A/N: Just to clarify, this is will become a romantic pairing eventually! It may be a tad bit of a slow burn at first just to allow the characters a comfortable amount of time to reach that point. I didn't want to rush into it considering the current predicaments they're in. I actually had finished this chapter at 3 am the other day, but I needed to reread it and make sure it wasn't just me in sleep deprivation thinking it sounded right. I ended up putting the song This Pain by Kamelot on repeat while furiously typing away until almost falling asleep at my keyboard; incase any one else enjoys musical accompaniment while reading. Hope you all enjoy and are having good weekends!

Chapter Three / Distinguishing Loss From Sacrifice

Being in the chamber on the nearest corner had afforded him one thing that was both a blessing and a curse. The grounds ran on a downward slope on the back end of the manor which left a certain amount of floors with the ability for a small rectangular barred window. The inclusion of this for this specific floor of course had more insidious purposes since it was strictly for vampires in it's past. Meaning with the dawn of every morning the sunlight filtered into the small cube with increasing brightness through midday. Every single day was a cycle of pressing as far into the corner of the windowed wall for endless seeming hours until the sun waned and evening returned once more. His only reprieve was on the darkest nights of the lunar cycle when he could see stars just beyond reach shining down on him.

Idly, his right fingers traced circles over the three centre fingers on his left hand. As they stretched from the back of his hand over his knuckles he felt the warm scarred flesh on the ends of his digits. The skin had turned ashen and damaged in a slow heal. A fateful reminder of his first sunrise after turning when he reached out delicately to warm his freezing body only to be singed with a fire burning his skin so intense it paled in comparison to the cruciatus curse. Originally, it had healed within his first feeding leaving only a faint grey tint visible only to the eyes of one such as himself. But then it became a private punishment, something he repeated to himself when first placed in the dungeons. Tempting himself to know if he could thrust himself fully into the light if it all became too unbearable. It had yet to reach that point, but his body started to stack scar tissue more and more as he was denied his life source beyond simple scraps. Eventually, the skin started to die faster than it could heal leaving behind a burn still warm to the touch and the colour of charred ash.

The first morning that he awoke to hear her cries in the chamber beside him was the first that he'd not run his fingers through the ritual he'd become so accustomed to. Something about her mournful hushed whimpering jarred him from the self loathing he'd been bathing in so deeply. The emotion it stirred felt so real and tangible that it made him realize he wasn't the only one suffering. It was dreadfully self centred and he knew it, but it had been hard for him to detach from his own internal monologue when left all alone in his solitude. His birth rights had always afforded him the peace of reflecting on his own needs and worries before anything else so it was nothing new for him to think only of the now and the future of his own physical needs. But by god, the screams that followed through into the evening when he heard them enter her room ripped him apart in fear. At one point he could smell something all too familiar and panicked looking down at his hand only to notice there was no sunshine flooding his floor, only the full moon's pale shimmer upon the dirt and bricks. The smell of burning hair was not his own meaning it was hers.

A knot formed in his throat listening to her screams become raw and guttural until they eventually just stopped even though the men could still be heard muttering vulgar things to her. His enhanced hearing had swiftly become a curse as he could hear every single movement, word, and filthy action uttered in that depraved cell. He began to wonder why they were so intensely interested in her as he had seen the other members often become bored rather quickly of any women they'd captured during raids. When Dolohov began visiting her regularly he knew then that she must be someone of great importance. Dolohov had very little qualms about discarding his little pets he took in; generally, they left the mansion in a burlap sack. It disgusted him to no ends having to ever share the same air as the beast of a man. Seeing the depravity of the men like him was the first crack to the porcelain held ideals he was raised with. It was one thing to have the vague understanding that there were those who'd take things to the extreme, but it was another to watch it with your own eyes and hear the cries of the victims. How were these men to be the superior beings that were flaunted as the ideal? He'd thrown up the first time his father subjected him to even just watching the things he'd do in their cellar to the maids when they'd done something he found wrong in their routine. There was no room to speak out in their world though, you had to turn a blind eye and grow to ignore it.

Eventually he learned though time doesn't heal those wounds, they just fester under the skin until they poison the well in your mind. In time you also become a beast in your own ways and drag around the skeletons and rattle the bones so others bear a hurt just as bad as your own. The way of the father passed down to the son and repeated for each generation until the family closet overflows with bodies. When he was young he'd often awake, shaking and hallucinating the dark scarlet red all around him, haunted like Lady Macbeth seeking to wash away the stain. But no matter how hard he'd scrub his skin raw in the showers alone at midnight the sorrow never left and with time it simply dulled, replaced with new horrors. A naïve little part of him always thought he'd never grow up to be like the man that he feared but time won out and he found he couldn't outrun destiny. Would it be possible to change at this age even when staring down the barrel of an unknown eternity? He didn't know.

A scream ripped him from his reverie but this time it wasn't her familiar cries, it was a man screaming. Dolohov, of course. Turning his head intently towards the wall he listened in for clues.

"You ungrateful brat! Look what you've done!"

His tone was seething and Lucius could hear him pacing back and forth in front of the woman as she breathed out heavily, something wet sputtering from her lips as she struggled to exhale.

"Do you want me to teach you a lesson? If you're going to act like an insolent child I can treat you just like one."

While he couldn't see anything he imagined Dolohov was wagging a finger in her face, he'd seen him do it enough times in the past. The way he talked to her though was bizarre and unlike any way Lucius had ever seen him treat his captives before. Almost as though he was holding himself back from the worst of his torments. The Dark Lord was known for allowing his followers to pick certain captives to keep for their own but he didn't often care what happened to them behind closed doors. If Dolohov was holding back then the woman had a price on her head that meant anything but death was allowed. Even if she wanted it herself.

"You're a monster."

Her voice was strained and liquid was still dribbling down her face.

"You don't even know what real monsters are little girl! Do you want to know what a real monster looks like? There's one right beside you that I'm sure would gladly take you in and feed on you like it was nothing. Is that what you want? Do you want to see a real monster?"

Her shackles rattled and it was obvious that he was untethering her and then dragging her across the dirt floor. As her door slammed open Lucius swallowed hard and stared down the door to his own cell. If his heart could still beat he was certain it'd be thumping in his chest like a wild jack rabbit. After the longest moment of his life he jolted back as Dolohov slammed the woman's face against the bars in the small window of his cell door. Her blood dripped down the wood under the bars and he could see her eyes and mouth were all swollen and busted open. He could smell it from across the room and felt his mouth start to salivate involuntarily at the aroma. Sickly sweet and with an earthly musk that enveloped him like a summer evening sun. There was another smell lingering just outside it that he couldn't place. It was heavily acidic and reminded him of the odours of the hospital wings during fever outbreaks. Something that was turning on itself with infection.

When he finally tore his gaze away from the blood trailing down the rotted wood it all finally made sense. Why she was there isolated in the bottom level. Why Dolohov treated her so strangely. Why she was so damned important. Something sank in the pit of his stomach knowing it meant she was never going to escape this torture without a rescue. He'd thought he'd felt a shift in the magical wards around the time of her arrival, but he thought nothing of it, figuring it to be only them reinforcing the wards against him.

"There's your monster darling. I bet he's already over there smelling your filthy blood and thinking of all the things he could do if I let you in this door. Is that what you want? Or do you want to finally listen to me when I ask you something?"

Dolohov leaned in whispering in her ear but was looking Lucius dead in the eye before slithering out his tongue along the side of her face. A revolting display to both taunt and mark his territory like a dog. Hermione was staring straight ahead into the blackness of the back wall of the room but her eyes were starting to crust over and the swelling obscured her vision into a blur of shapes in the darkness. As Lucius stepped forward into the moonlight streaming through the middle of the room she could see only an obscured shape with a white halo blur around him walking towards her. She thought silently how it reminded her of the cherubs in the paintings at her parents church growing up. A tiny but heavenly white glow around their heads meant to bring a sense of peace and goodwill. Her vision was growing weaker and she was close to blacking out from the pain. Her silence must have been misinterpreted as fear, but Lucius could tell she was barely even in her right mind.

"I didn't think so."

Dolohov grabbed her backwards with a fistful of her matted partially shorn hair and Lucius heard a sickening crack as her neck joints struggled with the sudden movement. If she wasn't already unconscious, she would be now. Slinking back into his darkest corner he listened as Dolohov threw her body into her room onto the floor as though she was nothing. Though he didn't see it, he averted his eyes with a quick glance away, his eyes boring holes into the decaying bricks. Ironic he thought, once again he was still instinctively looking the other way to other people's misfortune. The night waned on and the moonlight started to recede as the night inched closer to daybreak without a single sound from the room beside him. He worried that Dolohov may have broken the only rule there was for her but then he started to hear her scuttling around as though she was trying to push her body against the wall.

"In the grand scheme of things, do you find it worth it? Your suffering, I mean."

His voice was drained as he fought to ignore the odour of her blood as it dried on his door.

"I don't think I know anymore. I think sometimes I do, that there has to be a reason for it because I worry I wouldn't be able to go on if it didn't. But other times I'm just so run down that I don't even care. I just want it to end. Do you?"

Her throat was still swelling and her voice was two octaves higher than usual. It pained her greatly to speak but it was better than the silence for now.

"As my father would say, a man without misery hardly seems a man at all in times of war. Or some other rubbish rhetoric that's meant to embolden and scare young children into blindly accepting their losses and still march to the war drums."

It was one of the many phrases he heard repeated in his childhood to be hammered into his head and keep him firmly in place on the path his parents wanted. A sheep being led to slaughter without any idea. His chest pained at the thought that he'd done the same thing to his own son.

"I think more about the greater good I suppose. Perhaps it's the same, a line used on us as children to make us help complete someone else's plan. We all just seem like grains of sand in an hourglass at the end of the day. Eventually, the sand will all run out and time will be flipped and repeat itself again. No one ever seems to really learn from history even if we study it time after time. It's all rather exhausting. How many people have to die for something to really matter?"

Her words held a weight more unimaginable then he'd realized previously. Knowing now her identity he knew this fight was more personal for her than others. The unfathomable weight of knowing it was your own people that would be buried in mass graves if you didn't win the war. Sitting alone in this room where who knows how many others with his condition withered away and were likely buried in a similar pit put things into a perspective that made him uncomfortable.

"What did you do to rile up Dolohov so badly?"

Trying to steer the conversation to a much less grim topic he chose the one thing that still was left a mystery.

"Stupid git got a little too close for comfort and I showed him I have teeth for a reason."

She had bit him. He laughed out loud so naturally it almost startled him. The strange smell from earlier made sense now as well, it was the bite wound starting to seep and the camphor the man usually had on his other wounds. His mind started reeling with possibilities he'd not considered before.

"This gives me an idea and you can feel entirely free to say no as it would put you in likely danger. But if you made Dolohov mad enough, do you think he would truly put you in here with me? If I had someone else to distract a guard during feeding time I could use what little strength I do have to overpower them. It'd be a long shot, but it could give us a window for escape."

She didn't answer right away and he felt his hopes dashed but he knew that it was like asking someone to jump head first into a shark tank. He wasn't even sure if he would be able to restrain himself once actually put into the situation, but it was a dire situation no matter what way they looked at it. Either they stayed in their current positions to delve further into madness or they took a chance on something.

"It may take a couple of tries, but I think I could do it. I can tell he's been really struggling to hold himself back lately, but he's been wounded and I think an infection is irritating him."

The pact was made and the two retreated to silence once more as they ran through imaginary situations in their heads of how things may go. As sunlight began to filter into his room he heard her snoring lightly through her swollen nostrils. Though the dirt floor was far from comfortable he was sure it was the best sleep she'd had since she was shackled up three days before. He felt a curious tickle in his chest as he let his thoughts linger on her and their current circumstance. It felt lecherous to even entertain the thought, but for a moment it felt almost like he cared.