Hello, and sorry it's taken so long to publish the new chapter. Anyway, content warning: Mentions of horrific violence and degradation. If you notice anything else I should put in, message me and I will change the content warning.
Disclaimer: I do not own, nor claim to own, any part of the Harry Potter franchise as the creation and subsequent profit of the books belongs solely to J.K. Rowling. All of the characters are hers, however, any story line I create is mine.
Also, the quote at the end is an African Proverb.
Anyway, please enjoy this chapter- though it is pretty dark- and let me know what you think in the comments!
Now onward to the story!
~*o*~
"She looks like a sweet little lamb from afar, but when you get close, you find out she skinned and ate the damn thing just to use it as a coat.
She's a beast."
― J.J. McAvoy, Ruthless People
~*o*~
Thoughts lingered just out of her reach; frantic and splintered, like spun glass thrown against a wood-paneled wall. Glistening underneath a frosted window, absorbing the hues of light, reflecting a rainbow that vanishes in a blink. There is an itching beneath her eyes, and she blinks, and they are gone, floating away in swathes of shimmering opaque color, and she feels dizzy trying to stretch and reach for them. They are fractured surmises, unfinished plans, and she is seated precariously on the edge above the chasm they have all tipped into. Into the darkness, like a blanket of barbed wire that feels like silk against her skin, to complete and utter abandon. It is tempting; the tantalizing relief of letting go and slipping into the shadows. The sweet song as she lays her head to rest in the ruddy red of dawn. The leveling out of her breaths, gentle and sweeter, as she finally rests.
She thinks it would be easy to seep into the night.
Into the ebb and flow of the moon, to the shades of indigo and lavender, to the deep abyss of darkness and small fire-lights. To soft sighs and solitude. Imagining herself cocooned in the velvet crinkles that contort like smile lines, she thinks of how easy it would be to be free.
But when has freedom ever been free?
At first, it was not easy to fight for freedom.
But it was even harder to lose.
To then to claw against the door of her cell, begging someone- anyone to take mercy on a girl not yet out her teenage years.
She wondered if she had always been so naive.
She wondered if anyone had realized that they would cease to exist as children the day war was declared. Old men may play king on the chessboard, mind full of elaborate strategies to capture their opposition, but they were but soldiers- pawns, to trample and take.
But the biggest lie was not childhood; it was the colors that the kings were painted in. Plastic, flimsy hearts buried beneath the rubble, and the light was a grey as the grimy rags that clung to her body.
She thinks it would be easy to fall asleep and drift into the clouds of dawn.
The color of blushing cheeks, of her favorite cotton candy she used to get every year at a fair, of pink lemonade on a hot summer's day at her Grandmother's house.
She thinks it would be easy to die. Easier than it is to live.
Far, far easier than it is to live.
To grasp the hand of Death as she would an old friend, and travel through the archway between planes of existence and greet lovingly the emptiness that threatens to swallow her whole.
She thinks it'd be easy to let it consume her.
For what does emptiness thrive on but pain?
But if she has to live- and she does- she will learn how to grow stronger.
How to survive in the wilderness, how to turn her pain into power.
How to win.
If she had learned anything from losing a war, it was that the underhand plays and dirty tricks won skirmishes, and that morals held no place on a bloody battlefield.
They couldn't cast an endless stream of Stupefy and expect to triumph.
You can't be victorious when half of your troops have already been killed by an Unforgivable Curse as they clung to the idea of mercy.
Mercy didn't win wars.
She had learned that war was not full of glory and fighting was not a rush of adrenaline. It was a vicious cycle of ruin and the good guys did not always win. She had learned that wizards are wicked creatures that have made a pattern out of persecution and the ascent of power-hungry leaders.
She had learnt that it was 'Kill or be killed'.
She had learned that 'All is fair in love and war', but when all the love has been plucked out of your heart, it is near impossible to refuse the beckoning of Death's crooked finger, and the emptiness huddling near to the arch.
But someone - Luna- was alive, and so she had to live to fight another day.
She had to do what she did best.
Think.
Analyze, observe, fight, inspect, and plan.
Think.
Lie, steal, cooperate, mask, hide, and wait.
Think.
Her thoughts were still distant, fragments of possibilities weighed on plausibilities, but there was hope. The faint fluttering of a winged feeling that had long lain dormant.
They thought she was helpless.
They had shoved her into Azkaban in hopes of Hermione being forgotten, scared that if she died, she'd become the last martyr and the catalyst of a new revolution. She had outlived many of her friends, and the first year of the new empire had been a fragile one; Voldemort feared that it would all crumble. She would last Phoenix to crumble to ashes, if only for the third war to rise and wipe out all he had finally been able to build. If forgotten, tossed into a cell to waste and rot, she would provide only a symbol of what a revolution against the Dark Lord breeds; a slow death.
Maybe she would have made a beautiful and haunting martyr. The thing of legends and ballads, sung by bards over the centuries.
"The last of her kind and the end of a golden era. "
She's glad that she'd been forgotten. Her face, her capabilities, her magic. She's glad they think she's broken and malleable. That she has been reduced to be worth less than dirt and dust.
She's glad, because their surprise will only make her revenge that much more appealing.
Something they will have to learn:
'It's the quiet ones you have to watch out for.'
~*o*~
She licked her lips, tasting the salty residue of tears and the cracking skin beneath it. A heavy hand rose to her eyes, draping across the expanse of flesh and organs as if to hide the lingering splotches on them. Her other hand reached up to cradle her chin, fingers curling into the same position in which it had been bruised, and she gritted her teeth.
After moments spent unnervingly still, she let her hands fall to her sides. Her head hung down, and her hair tumbled over her side in an overgrown and tangled cascade. Her eyelids clenched shut, crusted edges slammed together, and hands furling into fists.
She listened as the soft reverberation of boots against the floor stopped before her door.
Eyelashes cresting pale purple eyelids swept open in one fluid motion, revealing blazing eyes. Like a dying man, she drank in the sight of her surroundings, aware it would be her last time in the wretchedly familiar.
And promptly, in the aftermath of a glance, let it crumble into ashes.
She shook herself, resisting the urge to rub her arms raw with her palms, and rolled her shoulders. She nestled her feet under her, perched on her heels like a sleeping doe. She folded her shoulders inward, and placed her manacled hands delicately on her knees.
She watched as Malfoy jerked open the door, listened to the creaking hiss it emitted, and the step of his panther-like gait when he walked towards her.
She found that she enjoyed the sight of him lying prone on the Hogwarts campus- nostrils gushing blood and whimpers escaping from his lips- far more than this pretentious, faux-predator walk.
She has always been rather proud of her right hook.
He came closer, and she glimpsed a flicker in his grey eyes when he examined her own brown ones.
She steadied her breaths and tried to dim down the intensity of her gaze, if only to project the pretty image of compliance that he wanted.
He knelt down, fine robes billowing around his frame, reached into his robes, and withdrew his wand. She tensed as he moved, expecting him to draw a wand that had been pulled from Harry's dead grasp after he was killed in the final battle at Hogwarts. Instead, he pulled out a wand that looked longer and slimmer, with a paler shade to it, and wrapped his fingers around the hilt.
She swallowed, unable to withdraw her gaze from the wand or escape the pensive feeling flooding her chest.
From whispers around her cell, she had deduced that the younger Malfoy had quickly risen high in Voldemort's ranks. The status of a General- because there was always a war to be fought, despite the fact that it had not remained civil- was quite high indeed.
And yet, he hadn't received his old wand back.
She snorted, and while he hadn't heeded her stare, Malfoy looked alarmed as he glanced up at her from where he was working on her restraints.
Hermione winked at him, waggling her eyebrows, and his eyes widened in surprise before he sneered at her.
"Get that imbecilic look off of your face, Mudblood."
Her face contorted in fury, before she forcefully smoothed out the ripples in her mask, and smiled as demurely as she could.
Malfoy blinked once, but instead of responding, he ducked his head down to look back at her chains as if he was content to simply ignore her. But he tugged harder at them, an agitated crease to his forehead, and she fought back a whimper as the iron bit into her tender skin.
She hoped Voldemort had tossed the miserable wand into a bonfire and made the coward watch as it burned.
It's what he had done to all of the history tomes in the libraries as his Death Eaters gathered all the books by Muggleborn authors.
She had cried as she watched them go up in flames.
She looked down to the manacles still swallowing up her wrist, and watched as the unfamiliar wand pointed at it as Malfoy muttered the final removal charm.
She wondered who crafted Malfoy's new one. Ollivander was dead, murdered soon after the Battle of Hogwarts, and from what she knew, it was difficult to find someone of the same mastery in the profession.
She had small hope- insubstantial, really - that a lesser conduit would mean Malfoy's magic would be less refined and spell-casting less intense.
Hermione imagined the experience of using wands to channel one's magic to be akin to the transfer of sand through a paper funnel. The smaller the opening at the end of the funnel, the more precise the deluge of sand would be. Granules would be less inclined to spill out through the fissures, and the stream of magic would hit in at a more measured and effective pace.
If Malfoy's wand was a subpar make compared to his old one, she might be able to find a way to use that to her advantage. His magic had always been formidable, but it had also always been second to hers, and Hermione had often found that he tended to not be able to separate his immediate emotional response from the logical next move in a fight. With the added effect of a mediocre wand, she may be able to overpower him in a fight- if she was able to swindle someone out of a wand.
But that was quite the sizable 'If', and it rested on the abilities of that she had almost six years ago.
With starvation, her muscles had atrophied, and her nerves and reflexes were shot from years of writhing under the Cruciatus curse. Sleep deprivation had been another torture consistently inflicted by her guards, and she would bet that her cognitive function had been damaged beyond the point of return by years of trauma to the brain.
Her despair made her impulsive, and she could not afford to make any mistakes.
It was a clinical approach, she wagered, to examine her weaknesses without judgment. If she didn't, she would implode out of the devastation she felt out of every physical and mental strength they had taken from her. In her desperation to do anything to survive, to save a friend, she would be dead the moment she stepped foot out of Azkaban.
But for now, they needed her, and needed her badly. In any other situation, they would not have retrieved her mangled body and possibly unhinged mind out of the cell they had tossed her in.
She could play the long game. As of now, even with a wand, she would not be able to survive a magical or physical engagement, and that meant she would have to wait. For now, she would have to fight in secret, and play her part if only to break down the interior of their operation. She needed to construct a plan, detailed and efficient, for how to save Luna. She no longer wanted to save the world, but whatever morals she still had went against her self-preservation, and she could not justify helping the one side she had always stood firmly against. She needed a plan exactly for the reason she stood against them; Voldemort was the incarnate of evil, and his followers were zealots that were responsible for the mass genocide of innocent children and other blameless people.
They would never honor a promise they made to a "mudblood," and especially not to one that was the best friend of Harry Potter. She knew Luna was alive- not because she trusted Malfoy's word, but because they knew she wouldn't cooperate unless she saw her- but she also knew they had zero intention of letting her go. She was another member of the light, and it served them nothing to let her run free. Just like they had every intention of sticking Hermione right back in her cage when they were done with her, like an abused owl that was the servant to cruel wizards.
But she knew she would never be able to go back if she had the chance to leave.
To bask in the sunlight and stare up at an endless blue sky, and then go back to a cramped and reeking cell.
She would need a plan, and above all else, she would need to be patient.
She looked back at Malfoy, and admired the beads of sweat collecting on his forehead, a symptom of his rather impressive concentration on a rather simple incantation.
Maybe she was right about it being a lesser wand.
"Getting tired in your old age Malfoy?" Hermione rasped out, her lips twitching upward.
His head whipped to the side in a way that looked painful, and a pale sheen of sweat shone on his face as he looked up at her.
He looked surprised at first, but his face quickly sank into an ugly look, staring at her as if she was a pile of horseshite that he had mistakenly stepped in.
"Better than increasingly stupid as the years pass. What did I say about respect?" he snapped.
She was elated to see that his composure was slipping, an effect she guessed was brought on by his irritation that his magic was working slower than he hoped.
She cocked an eyebrow, copying his earlier expression.
"Sorry, sir, but I thought we established that I've never had an easy time with that. Something to work on, indeed."
She stumbled over the words, voice cracking and throat throbbing painfully at the end, but it was worth it to see his dumbfounded expression.
But as the delight of her slight towards him faded, she chastised herself for not remaining unassuming.
She would need to remain what they expected; a shadow of her former self.
Hermione would need to remember the long game.
"I'm sorry, sir," she whispered, and this time her throat was not pained, but her pride took a beating. "Next time, I will remember my place, sir."
He looked baffled as her words sunk in, but his expression turned smug as a smirk curved his lips.
"Indeed. See to it that you do, Mudblood. Not everyone will be as forgiving as I am of your impudence."
She nodded, looking as fragile and submissive as she could, and left him alone to finish working on her bonds.
After moments held aloft by heavy breaths and jerks of his wand, she felt a sharp nudge against her wrists. Hermione bit her lips, and tugged them up slightly as she also shook her ankles, and the small movement caused them the now-delicate clasps to dislodge.
Her manacles and leg irons crumpled to the ground, and she was free of her chains for the time in five years. Hermione looked down at the harsh red and lined places where they one had weighed down, and rose to her feet. She was slightly unsteady as her sense of gravity changed, no longer heaving heavy iron with her as she stood, and she grimaced a brush as oxygen hit her raw skin.
She looked down at Malfoy, still kneeling on the floor, and felt lighter than she had in years.
"Thank you," she croaked out.
She thought he would sneer again, a constant expression that he had worn over the years, but as she met his pale eyes, he simply nodded and looked away.
"Alright," he tapped his long fingers together, still looking away from her. "Now onto bathing."
"I will not have you coming into my home smelling like a swine, and meeting the Dark Lord looking like a vagrant."
She squinted, holding back a deadpan comment about the conditions she had been tossed into, or a needling comment about how torture diminishes one's health.
Hermione had guessed that she would have to go to Malfoy Manor, the place of her capture, and meet Voldemort. She had been prepared for it, and barely felt a sliver of panic enter her as she contemplated this affirmation of the fact.
She had seen worse- been through worse since then, and the prospect of returning was not terrifying as it once was. Her strength may have been diminished, and hope newfound, but her abject numbness to fear for herself had been a constant ally during her stay in Azkaban.
"Yes sir," she looked down and murmured.
He nodded sharply, and yanked her by a bony elbow towards the door.
She stared forward, refusing to turn back to look at the cell she was leaving, and clenched her fist as the continued towards the door.
Malfoy grasped the handle, but before he wrenched it open, he turned to her.
"Mudblood," he hissed, towards her downcast gaze, and grabbed a chunk of her hair, and pulled her up to look him in the eyes.
"A message from the Dark Lord: If you try anything, he will know. If you try to escape, we will hunt you down and make you watch as we kill Lovegood. If you kill yourself, he will kill 24 muggles and 24 houselves in your place, one for each year you have been alive, for your death and Luna. If you harm or kill a loyal follower of the Dark Lord, we will have to do whatever you have done to them to you tenfold, and then carve out little Looney's skin, a phrase for every creature she had ever babbled on about while we make you watch. If you try anything, he will know, and the Dark Lord will retaliate until you beg and plead to mercy."
Her nostrils flared, eyes swelling with tears before she could blink them away, and as one passed the rim of her eyelids, Malfoy reached out a slender finger and brushed it away.
"He will know, Granger. If you want Luna to live, don't try anything."
He looked at her with emotionless, flat eyes, and she swallowed back the panic coating her throat and choking her breath.
He blinked, and something like regret entered his gaze as she fought to control her tear ducts from overflowing.
Hermione looked down at the filthy, cracked floor and mustered her fracturing courage and her breaking heart.
She looked up, eyes suspiciously red but dry, and nodded, because what else could she afford to do?
Malfoy jerked his head towards her, and twisted towards the door. He opened it, hinges complaining, and stepped out into the corridor. He beckoned back to her, eyes pasted on a wall she could not see.
Hermione swallowed, hands shaking and stepped tentatively forward, just before the doorway. She gulped in a shallow breath and swayed for a second in the space before the corridor.
Finally, she stepped forward.
Her bare feet hit a new texture of ground, and she curled her toes against the hard concrete surface as she licked cracked lips.
She looked up at Malfoy as he stared at a bare, grey wall and narrowed her eyes.
Whether he meant it as a warning or a threat, she would be undeterred.
He thought Hermione didn't know what would happen if she failed?
She had fucking lived it.
She looked down at the white knuckles of her clenched fists and the purple under her toenails, heart heart thudding against her chest and breath rocking her from side to side.
She would make them pay.
She would make them all pay.
They thought she was broken, malleable, unhinged, maybe even god damn insane, and maybe she was.
But when a witch has little to lose and everything to gain, she is a danger to everything and everyone. She was like a hurricane, full of icy rain and a wind ready to uproot everything in her path, draining herself as she stormed.
She was like a hurricane, and Hermione was ready to wash this whole shattered world away.
~*o*~
"The axe forgets, but the tree remembers."