Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to JK Rowling. I am only playing with (torturing) the characters for a little bit, after which I will put them back into her box of toys, where they belong.
Author's Note: Eh, so I know my last update was a very long time ago. I'm sorry for the delay. I'm also sorry if this chapter's a bit crappy, I got stuck at this part of the storyline for a very long time as you can see and now I just want to get it over with so I can proceed with the next chapter! Thanks to everyone who had reviewed!
Chapter 22
Years later, when he had the time to reflect on the past, it occurred to him that it wasn't the sight of McNair writhing so pitifully that had made his skin crawl. It had been the thought of: What if the person being tortured had been him? What if it had been Granger? Nothing was more frightening than seeing something so terrible, and then wondering when one's time would finally be up. Because it had to be, hadn't it? One could only escape for so long before everything that had been held off rushed greedily up to one to devour it.
He had always been a selfish git, and that had never changed. His experiences with loss and a stark determination had lessened his cowardliness; but the selfishness had always been there, somewhere inside of him, even when he had seemingly been selflessly caring for Hogwarts, and caring for the members of the Order.
That episode had taught him one thing: If it had not been for revenge, and for Hermione, he would have run far, far away from all this, long ago.
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He had come to only days later, according to Madam Pomfrey. And while his head hurt like hell and his muscles ached so much he wanted to rip them from the bone, seeing the glistening eyes of Hermione as she tried not to cry in front of him somehow made his insane bout of heroism seem all worthwhile.
"I…I thought you were gone, Draco," she sniffed, brushing the errant tears away from her muddy brown eyes (that they were, but they were still beautiful to him), "And then even though you came back, we almost…we almost lost you…so many times."
By Merlin's checkered trousers, he'd never seen her so pitiful and yet at the same time so adorable in his entire life. Her voice squeaked in several places, her hair was, as usual, a mess that could only be best described as 'rat's nest', her nose was red and swollen and she looked as though she hadn't bathed in days…but…
He immediately reached out to hold her, to encircle her within his arms. She was so soft, so fragile. Where did her usual great strength come from, he wondered? Smiling to himself thankfully as he murmured a soft, "there, there," he stroked her thoroughly unmanageable hair as she finally broke down and sobbed and hiccupped on his shoulder, her crying and his whispering the only sounds in the empty stone room.
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Unfortunately for Longbottom, Granger recovered from her crying fit soon enough, and the torture/training sessions were back in season.
And after feeling so helpless for the past couple of days, Draco had to admit that some Longbottom bashing always managed to be like a soothing balm to his soul.
He smiled wickedly as he blasted another curse at Neville. The other boy squeaked and scrambled behind a cupboard that immediately burst into flames. Ah, missed him. Too bad.
Another half hour of nonchalant Longbottom maiming ('training', as Draco called it) would continue before something suddenly occurred to him. He had already furnished the Order with the details of his trip into Ginny's mind, and all that had happened during. The problem now was that none of them knew what to make of it. By now it was obvious that the scene Draco had witnessed was one of Voldemort killing Macnair. However, were the images a part of Voldemort's memories? And if so, why would Ginny hold any of his memories? Were they a side effect of his mind control over her? Did they even mean anything at all, or were they some kind of hallucination or dream of Ginny's? But there was something else…
"It was funny though."
"Funny now?" asked Hermione off-handedly as she shot another curse at the pitiful Neville, who only just blocked it in time with a hastily conjured shield.
"Well…while I was there…in that white room and then later on seeing the Dark Lord torture that poor sap, well, I thought…I thought I saw the inside of Malfoy Manor."
All at once Hermione stopped her torture of Neville, who flopped back onto the stone floor thankfully, gasping for breath.
She stared at him as he continued, "Yeah I think it was Malfoy Manor you know. I mean, that was my father's study. I recognize the little elves' heads on the walls and the nicks and scratches on his table. I used to go in there all the time to show Dobby the heads to scare him into doing what I wanted." He sniggered at that, looking out of the corner of his eye for Hermione's inevitable blasting of him and his "cruelty and mistreatment" of the elves. When she didn't say anything and instead just continued to stare at him, he shrugged and continued, "So well yeah. I didn't see much of it, but what I could see I think I sort of recognized."
He stared at the ground, thinking, "There was this…strange hissing sound too. I mean, it practically filled the room, like a sonorous charm or something. I was so pissed off, I couldn't get it to stop."
"Why…why didn't you tell us about this earlier, Draco?" asked Hermione, a frown marring the features of her face.
"Well," he replied archly, "when you're stuck in a weird white room for what seems like days and with no way out in sight, and then have all kinds of weird things happen to you in there, you kind of not think of anything else other than how thankful you are when you finally get out."
Her only reply was to look at the floor pensively. Both teenagers ignored the pitiful, "So is the training over yet?" whimpers from Neville, each deep in thought.
"Draco," said Hermione, finally breaking the silence and causing him to look up at her in curiosity, "Voldemort was in Malfoy Manor last week, at about the time when you were in Ginny's mind."
He rolled his eyes. "So what?" he replied off-handedly. "I'm pretty sure he's in there all the time now. Bloody bugger, taking what is supposed to be my birthright, shacking up in my mansion…" his tone of voice got darker and darker as he continued muttering about Voldemort and his usurpation of his inheritance.
"No he isn't. Our spies have it that he moves all the time now, in order to avoid detection. And Draco, Ginny has never been on the inside of Malfoy Manor."
"And?" he sighed, exasperated with the obtuseness of her line of thought.
"And so we can confirm now that that image of Malfoy Manor couldn't possibly have come from her memories, and she couldn't have possibly made it all up, even though you were in her part of the mind."
"Okay, so they were Voldemort's memories then."
"No!" Now her eyes glittered strangely, and she had the same look she always had whenever she was close to solving a really difficult Arithmancy problem, "The fact that Voldemort was in Malfoy Manor just last week means that there's a possibility that what you had seen weren't just his memories. Ginny, when she was lucid had told me that she sees what Voldemort sees, that she has been trapped in a white room! The timeline fits! Voldemort has only been in Malfoy Manor since last week! Prior to that our scouts have said that he'd been moving around on the Continent, probably Italy and France, for the longest time. Macnair had failed in his mission at Godric's Hollow only about a month ago! Therefore, it is entirely possible that he was killed last week at the manor. Ginny is seeing through Voldemort's eyes! You had seen through their eyes when you were stuck in her mind!"
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