Title: Fall in Five

Rating: PG-13

Word count: 3084 words

Prompt: 006-010. Days - Years

Author's Notes: I know I tend to repeat themes, but I hope they don't get too tiring. These are a series of five ficlets for the Fanfic100 challenge.

I. Hours

Hermione huddled tightly into the darkened, dusty corner of the library. She almost did not fit between the stone and shelves, but she brought her knees up to her chest and held her wand between her thighs so that the tip peeked through her calves. She would be ready if anyone came.

A spider crawled over her arm, and for a moment her heart froze before she could brush it off, shuddering. She was surprised at her very physical reaction to the tiny black creature - she was usually not afraid of spiders - but she blamed the rawness that vibrated strangely under her skin.

Hogwarts had fallen. The center had collapsed. Voldemort had attacked. The corridors were littered with the bodies of children and professors, slack jaws, maimed parts, dull, glassy eyes. She saw them take Harry, saw them kill Ron, saw them... and there was nothing to do but run. She would feel guilty later. She was seized by an uncontrollable urge to preserve her life. The blankness of a dead future caught her beneath the throat. And she ran.

She ran to the library, her old haven, that place she could always find the answers. The books were quiet now, though. Hermione heard muted screams through the thick walls, but they sounded so far away. Surreal. She shut her eyes and rocked her head against the stone behind her. She had been there for a few hours. She needed to pee, her limbs were beginning to ache, but she would not (could not) (run) move.

She thought of the one Death Eater whose mask had been stripped from his face - she hoped by one of the old Dumbledore's Army members - those cold, clean features with strands of blond hair that looked soft on his dark robes. Lucius Malfoy, of course, finally out of Azkaban. She could see it in the dark raggedness under his eyes. His boots may still have been expensive, but his eyes were like those of the victims in the corridors, the ones with blood adorning the paleness of their cheeks. But Lucius could still smile when he rendered his enemies as dead as he was.

She thought of Neville in his bed. Hermione had rushed to the boys' dormitory to reconvene with her boys. That was when she saw one of the Death Eaters - there were no discerning features this time - engulf Ron in the green light that so cleanly stripped him of his life. There he was on the floor in his paisley pajamas. Adorable, undignified, and dead. Then Harry, struggling against hands. A spell and he collapsed. But he was not dead - Hermione could see his chest still moving, and the incantation had been all wrong. And they would not want him dead - that honor would go to the Dark Lord. Impractical, but after all this time, Hermione supposed the victory would be far sweeter in person. Hermione almost jumped out from behind the door where she had hidden upon seeing the Death Eaters in the room, but her lungs tightened, and though she kept telling herself to attack - get out there kill hurt what was the DA for you coward - but she could only quiver until the Death Eaters had gone. She looked up through her burst of hair and tears to see Neville in his bed. For a moment, Hermione hoped that they had not got him, that he was just sleeping, that he had slept through it all, and the Death Eaters had not seen him as a threat. But the blankets were not moving with the rhythm of his breathing, and Hermione stumbled from the room.

She thought about what her body might have looked like if she had jumped out at the Death Eaters. Draped over Ron probably. Face down on the floor, nose cracked. Finally with Ron in his room, there in her nightgown and in his pajamas, intertwined in mutual lifelessness, a marriage of corpses. And she was happy she had run.

She hated herself for it, but she was happy she had run.

So she stayed there, hidden in the niche. And she hoped they would never think to look too hard in the library.

---

II. Days

The castle was completely silent. Her ears rang with it as hour after excruciating hour turned into day after torturous day. She wanted to hum, whistle, murmur to herself, push down a shelf of books and watch the library topple around her, but she could not know if they would still find her. For all their festivities that could be heard to Hogsmeade after the Hogwarts slaughter, this new complete nothingness as they hovered at the door of the library, stalked with hushed robes through the aisles as she eluded them. Just enough. They stopped coming in a regular sweep, only to collect certain books now and then.

That was when she first saw Voldemort, the Dark Lord that had stretched Harry Potter's limbs until the muscles had torn - he had not let the bones break or jerk from their sockets, just that wrenching sound of ripping tissue. Hermione had watched from a window. She heard him scream. She watched hex after hex thrown at him there on the pike, watched Bellatrix spit on his sneakered feet, watched Snape strip him of his robes and leave him in Muggle clothing before breaking his wand before Harry's rolling eyes. Then she watched Voldemort kill him, the great green light that swept over the darkened hillside. She had screamed once, pounded her fists on the glass and slid down to curl herself back into the niche. In her dream that night, Harry whispered in her ear, Coward. As she lived and watched him die five thousand times, she heard the accusation.

Coward.

Yet she did not run into the Great Hall or the dungeons or Astronomy Tower where the Death Eaters must still be - but so silent - and challenge them to a foolish duel to die in blazes of glory befit a Gryffindor who needed to avenge her best friend's death. She just hid.

Coward.

Then there was the day that she was found. Big round eyes in front of her prone face, frightening to wake up to. She squeaked and tried to back up, but her head collided with the stone wall, and she saw lights and darkness before the strangeness faded. Familiar and unassuming.

"Dobby?" she whispered.

"Sorry, miss," Dobby whispered back. "Dobby didn't know how to wake Hermione. Hermione should not be here." His eyes darted from side to side, checking the entrance.

"Do you know a way out, Dobby? Is there some place that I could slip through...?"

"Harry Potter is being dead, Hermione," Dobby said.

Hermione lowered her head and nodded. "I saw," she said.

There was a moment. Hermione wanted to see Dobby's face, but then she didn't.

"Hogwarts is being closed for a witch, although Dobby can leave. Dobby is afraid Hermione will have to be staying here until Dobby can find some way. Dobby will try, because Hermione was the friend of Harry Potter."

Coward. Now she saw it in Dobby's face even as he searched and in the way he was rougher with her when he brought meals, impersonal. He used to love her, he used to love the Hermione who encouraged him as a house elf to be free. Hermione felt the slight but never questioned it. Day after day after day after day after day

Coward.

Then, when the voice of the dead became all she could hear in the silence, she stood up and left the sanctuary of her niche. She would not fight, but she would let herself be tortured and killed.

Hermione froze five feet from the entrance as a hand wrapped around her upper arm.

"I conquered Hogwarts. I own Hogwarts. The house elves belong to me. Do you think your presence has gone unnoticed?"

Her shoulders slumped and her dirty hair fell around her face in clumps as she stumbled to her knees. "Lord Voldemort."

---

III. Weeks

"Hogwarts has fallen to me, and I am its master now. The wizarding world quells before my face as I sweep in shadows from city to city to country to country. My fingers stretch across the globe as they succumb. What are you, then, to me?"

"Nothing."

She felt her cheek press into the richness of the carpet as his boot rested on her head. She was not chained. No magic held her in the room. No guard waited outside the unlocked door. She stayed there by her will and the pressure of Voldemort's hand over her, even when he was not in the room.

"You are the coward among your friends. They died slowly, the death of heroes. But they are dead. You are alive. What is your life worth now?"

"Nothing."

Weeks turned into months. She knew the routine by heart now, and she had never resisted. Her body was limp in his presence, malleable, defeated from the moment his Death Eaters stepped into Hogwarts. Her room was like a glass case with large windows on two sides that faced the corridors that flanked her room. Curtains were drawn at night so that she could undress and sleep. Death Eaters that recognized her would watch at three o'clock on Wednesdays when Voldemort came to her. He only gave a half an hour to quietly humiliate her. But she was there and knelt before him when he came.

"You bow before me like one of my own, but you could never be those creatures to whom I gave my mark, my energy, my favor, you who mewl like a flea-ridden dog, you whose blood is not worthy to feed my vampires, whose soul is too impure for my dementors. What can you possibly offer me, my followers, those who give me their complete love and allegiance?"

"Nothing."

She was permitted no interaction, but those personal enemies would bring things to the windows, bracelets, wands, broken children in ragged clothes, things that she recognized and drew away from, things that made guilt go rigid inside of her, a cold plank of ice against her spine. They never came in, although they could. They could come in and ravage her body into neat strips of bloody meat for Fenrir to feast upon. They could take her from her glorified prison and have her as a servant after the trouble that she had caused them. But they didn't. All they could do was try to make her cry, but her eyes merely pricked with salt. She had no tears.

"I could present you to the world that you betrayed for your own skin, throw you naked and hungry before them, and my Death Eaters and the wizarding world and the Muggle world would be as one in their hatred of you, perhaps more hatred than they foster for me. What have you done for them?"

"Nothing."

Voldemort was not as tall as she imagined him to be. His wrists were thin and his boots heavy despite his lithe frame. He practically looked delicate up close, but she knew better when he grabbed her throat and forced her face to the ground, when he pressed his boot against her head with just enough force to keep from crushing her skull completely, when he pulled her back up by her hair and pushed her to her bed. And she knew his skill with a wand, which stayed there on his belt, waiting for her to resist. But she never did.

You are nothing to me. You're nothing but the echo of Harry Potter's friend, the stalwart sort to stand by his side until death. You're nothing but an impure Mudblood who is not worthy to touch my boot. Then why do I keep you alive?"

"I don't know, my lord."

She did not know why she did not run.

---

IV. Months

There came the day when she walked out of her room - it could never be called a prison. Decked in rich fabrics unfit for her, softened by thick carpet and feather bed and velvet she never deserved. Voldemort threw her treachery in her face, and all she could do for eleven months was sink in it drowsily, wrap it around her like a scarf while whispering Unclean.

Her feet were bare and made just a brush of sound as she walked through the corridors of what was once Hogwarts. She could see only the slightest differences now, but she realized how much Hogwarts had been alive when it was a school. Its presence was empty, skeletal, but not hopeless despite the musty smell of the air. Hermione did not understand why Hogwarts could not turn on its new master until she looked into rooms and saw students. Students. It was the slap of a paper fan against her eyes, but she looked again. Slytherin colors. Ravenclaw colors. Hufflepuff colors. Gryffindor colors. Were they ghosts? Memories? Mockeries?

But they weren't. At the creaking of the door, they all turned to look at her, the wisp of a thing she had become despite the warm, healthy glow in his cheeks. They pointed and a murmur filled the otherwise silent castle. The professor looked up from his desk, and slow curve of lip made her swallow. She closed the door to Professor Snape's familiar face.

Her toes curled away from the cold stone as they led her to the entrance hall and out the doors. The patches caused by heated battle had grown over after the ravages of winter. The lake rippled with the wind, mildly reflecting the steel gray sky.

"You brought the clouds, not I," Voldemort said. "Ready, were you, to leave your self-made prison?"

"Where am I?" Wide eyes, wide pupils. Her head was too open, and she was inundated with the fullness of her surroundings.

She was down in the grass, moving, moving, running, reaching for life in the familiar things around her. She ran down the hill to the lake to the forest around the castle running for the town to meet the gate to return. Voldemort leaned against the door, arms crossed under his chest, watching her with narrow eyes as she slowly climbed the stairs to him.

"Nowhere to run to, Hermione?" he asked. His hand whipped out, grabbed her hair, bent her head back almost tenderly as he made her kneel. Her teeth clenched in shame as she obeyed him. "Who is left to take you in... but me?"

"Why would you take me in? To throw me among the house elves and other poor Mudbloods to serve purebloods and whatever their twisted idea of poetic justice is? I would rather run." Even as her words snapped through sharp bouts of breath, she brought her face to the level of his boots.

"It is no less than you believe you deserve," he replied. He did not press her down - he had let go of her when she began speaking. "And it is no less than you deserve." Her breath misted the leather before them, and the dark circles under her lashes sparkled when he thought she was dry. His tongue touched the edge of his teeth when she raised her eyes.

"Is that what is left for me?" There was no accusation, no pleading, no anger, no resignation, nothing.

There was a clatter behind her, and Voldemort slid his wand into his sleeve. "Duplication spell. The wand broken was a duplication." He watched, his muscles singing in tension, as she pushed herself sitting and reached for her wand. He watched as the tips of her fingers touched the wood grain, seeking for recognition, wrapping around it familiarly. She stood, held her wand half-cocked, looked at him. He knew the calculation flickering behind her eyes from what he saw from any Death Eater who bared his or her arm to him for the branding of the Dark Mark.

"You have other uses than as a servant," Voldemort said. "As worthless as you were to your friends, perhaps you will find your value with your enemy. Unless, of course, after all this time you would like to finally martyr yourself for a dead cause. This is my world now, and even those such as you have their place."

She had her chance in that silent space with her wand in hand and his hands empty. She saw the flash of round lenses and green eyes. She saw white beard, a sea of red hair, Quidditch games.

Her wand was in his hand now. He opened the front door to Hogwarts, and she preceded him into the castle.

---

V. Years

She still wandered the halls of Hogwarts like a ghost, but no one stopped her between their classes, no one hit her or cursed her or even touched her. Bare feet against cold stone in the winter, fingers trailing against the walls. Sometimes, not very often, she would go outside and stand in the place where Harry died. Sometimes she would scare the boys in the Gryffindor dormitory ("who wants to be in Gryffindor? that's the house Potter was in, isn't it? no thank you") by staring at the beds where she watched Ron die and saw Neville dead in his sleep.

Sometimes she would cry at night, cry into the white bedsheets, curl her nails into the comforter and feel tears sliding down the sides of her face. Staring into the candlelight and having it burst at the corner of her eyes. The comforter would slip from her hands, and her nails would bite into the palm. Little crescent moon-shaped marks welling and staining the sheets. Her breathing would quicken, eyes wide, darkening.

I'm not, she would whisper, I'm not I'm not I'm not like you Harry I'm not strong enough to die Everything's different now Everything's changed and nothing's changed. He's here now. You're dead and he's here and I'm here. What do you expect me to do?

She hears the command to kill him. She has a wand. Kill him. She would turn over, smear his white skin gently, and he would turn and calm her breathing, take her air until her eyelids fluttered, taste the salt on her skin, hiss her softly into sleep. Just at night. He only touched her at night.

By day, she wandered.