I'm sorry this took so long to get up, but I'm afraid this is it until February I hope you like it. Istalindar
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Hermione was startled awake by a bucket of cold water on her face. No chance of hoping the whole miserable experience was just a dream – not when her bed seemed rather rocky and her alarm clock dripped down the wall and puddled below her.
She didn't move or even open her eyes. Her body still ached from yesterday's question-and-answer session, and she wasn't quite prepared to have another round. Honestly, suffering from the uncomfortable sensation of having your limbs pulled forcibly in all directions at the same time was hardly incentive to talk about Harry. Every muscle burned, and it was a miracle she had managed any sleep at all.
"Up, brat!" Hermione pain-stakingly opened one eye to see Madeleine, her ever-polite kidnapper staring down at her, an interesting tool dangling from her hand. Clearly Madeleine was trying a new tactic.
"How lovely to see you this fine day." Hermione murmured. "Terribly sorry, but I don't believe I can move this morning." The ridiculous voice was all she could do to up Madeleine. Sure, dear old Maddy could completely cripple Hermione, but she could neither gag nor break her. Otherwise Hermione wouldn't be able to tell them where Harry was. "You might want to join your little torturer buddies and lighten up a bit, eh?"
Madeleine's shoe connected with Hermione's ribs and she gasped at the sudden pain.
"Thought I told you to keep your mouth shut!" Madeleine hissed.
"But then how will I tell you where Harry is?" Hermione asked sweetly. She closed her eye again, and tried to relax to ease the pain. Madeleine grabbed Hermione's chin and dragged her into a sitting position, leaving Hermione slumped against the wall.
"Finally! Tell me where he is!" Madeleine exclaimed. Hermione smiled.
"Neinen, Frau Bitch." Hermione grinned, the smile somewhat gappy due to lost teeth. "Try a new game, Madeleine. This one's getting old." Madeleine growled and punched Hermione in the jaw. Since Hermione was sititng up against the wall her head didn't have anywhere to go and it snapped back into the stone and made an alarming cracking sound before falling forward. Hermione slumped unconscious.
"Bucket." Madeleine said coldly. One of the deatheaters placed a bucket of icy water swimming with ice fragments by her feet within arm reach. Madeleine reached down and picked it up before dashing its contents into Hermione's face. Her head snapped up again, hitting the wall with another sickening crack, but this time she stayed conscious, bringing one aching hand to her eye to wipe away the trickle of watery blood that dribbled from a cut higher up on her forehead from the ice.
"Concussion much?" she muttered irritably. She tenderly touched the back of her had and found it bloody. "See, that's not helping." She commented. "What if I had forgotten-" She stopped talking, her attention drawn to the new character who had just arrived on the scene. All the other deatheaters were bowing to him then stepping back well out of his way. Madeleine turned to face the visitor, and Hermione slipped sideways, sliding down the wall to rest back on the floor again.
"What do you think you're doing in my dungeon, Madeleine?" he asked archly, his voice ice-tipped and deadly soft.
"Your dungeon?" Hermione asked incredulously. Figures.
"Be quiet." His voice was somewhat kinder to her and that in itself shut her up. Since when had he ever been kind to her? "How dare you?"
"The Dark Lord assigned her to my care." Madeleine spluttered. She stalked right up to him, and seemed a little crestfallen to discover that she was quite a bit smaller than he was. "Even you cant negate that!"
"The Dark Lord left my house under my control." He said coldly. "And that includes my dungeons." He looked at Hermione, then back to Madeleine. "When was the last time you fed her?"
"I assure you, I've been well watered." Hermione remarked from the floor. He watched a drop of water drip off her nose into the puddle below her face.
"So it would appear." He said drily. Hermione's eyebrows shot up. A joke? What was the world coming to? He turned to Madeleine. "Our master wants Mr Potter's location when he is not at school." He circled Madeleine like a wolf circling prey. "You're hardly going to discover that if you starve and break her." He slapped her sharply across the face, and Hermione cowered into the wall, trying to make herself as small as possible. "Get out." He said flatly. He turned away from her.
"I'll take her with me!" Madeleine insisted. He spun back to face her, and grabbed her throat with one black-gloved hand. She gasped and clawed at his hand.
"You'll do no such thing. She is staying here and that is final, do you understand that?" he hissed. Madeleine merely gasped, her face turning purple. He shoved her to the floor and released her, and she took deep breaths, her hand at her reddened throat. "Get out." She scrambled to her feet and dashed out of the room before turning back just outside the door.
"The Dark Lord will hear about this. And you will fall." She threatened. He laughed, and she glared at him before flouncing off.
"Leave." He turned to the other guards.
"But sir-"
"GET OUT!" he roared. The sound echoed off the walls of the stone room and Hermione covered her ears with her ruined hands and tried to curl farther into the wall. They filed silently out of the dungeon, leaving her alone with him. Her stomach twisted but Hermione kept her face blank. Three months in this fucking dungeon and possibly the only thing she had learnt was how to keep her face wiped clean of any information or emotion.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked, crouching by her prone body. She nodded. He held up one gloved hand. "How many fingers?".
"I'm not stupid, you know." She burst out. She immediately shrank back, but the wall against her torso hingered her moving back any further than she already had.
"No, though anyone who didn't know might question that fact." He said calmly. "I am simply checking that you have not lost any basic brain functions. Now, how many fingers?"
"Two." She said sullenly. He arched one golden eyebrow. "And a thumb." He smiled at her, then stood.
"That is remarkable." He commented. "Three months in a dungeon, torture, starvation and mistreatment, and you still dare to use the sharp mind and wit you are so famed for. A lesser man would have snapped."
"Then it's a damn good thing I'm woman." Hermione muttered. He smiled again, and held out his hand. She eyed it warily.
"Come on then." He urged. "I'm not going to bite you."
"That's fortunate." She rolled her eyes. "But much as I'd love to taint your pureblooded belongings, flesh or otherwise, I find myself completely incapable of ruining your day so."
"You don't have to speak like that, you know. Unlike Madeleine, the idea of a mudblood trying to rise above her station doesn't really annoy me. It amuses me, but doesn't irritate me the way it does Madeleine."
"How big of you. But it still doesn't change the fact I'm still pretty much incapable of going anywhere."
"You want to stay?" He asked, shocked.
"Oh, please. Wanting to stay and being incapable of leaving are completely different things." Hermione sighed.
"What are you talking about?" he demanded, his eyes narrowing. Hermione used one hand to brush at the blanket covering her lower body, the tattered filthy bit of cloth that had served as towel, blanket, and just about everything else, but the fabric clung stubbornly to her. He picked at the cloth with a wrinkled nose and plucked it from her body and dropped it in a pile beside her.
"Well, well." He said. Hermione half expected him to finish his sentence with 'Miss Madison' as all his deatheater pals were so prone to do, but he didn't, just stood there and looked at her broken and bent legs, one of which was chained to the wall. Then he said a charm that Hermione didn't know and the shackle blew off her leg with a scream of misused metal, and swirled his cloak from his shoulders and wrapped it around her before gently lifting her broken body into his arms and carrying her out of the dungeon.
Hermione could only stare at his face.
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He took her to a room decorated entirely in white. White wall, white curtains over the big french windows, white marble floor, white rugs, white-painted wrought iron canopy bed with white bedding. The light blinded her and Hermione buried her face in his shoulder to get away from it. He smelled of warm things – spice and a deep ingrained smell of woodsmoke. Funny. She'd have thought he'd smell colder than that.
"Close your eyes, I'm going to put you down." He instructed. She did so and he gently laid her on the bed. She felt bereft of his warmth and she cracked her eyes open to look up at him. "Madeleine certainly outdid herself with you, didn't she?" he commented quietly, gently brushing a few strands of Hermione's mad hair out of her face. He reached into his robes and withdrew a shining silver knife, and Hermione drew back into the pillows. "Calm down." He said softly. "I have to cut away your clothes so I can see the extent of the damage so I can fix it." Hermione didn't move, the realisation that there was nowhere to go sinking into her mind. Even if she hadnt been crippled and alone in the house of one of the most famed deatheaters in the middle of the countryside. He wanted to cut her clothes off and there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it.
"Hermione." Her gaze flew to his face. It was the first time any of them had called her Hermione. It had always been 'mudblood', 'Miss Granger', 'Miss Madison' or just 'Madison'. She had almost forgotten what her real name had sounded like. "Relax. I'm not doing this for some sick pleasure." He smirked. "You're not really my type."
"Thank God for that." Hermione muttered.
"I just need to know exactly what your injuries are so they can be healed. I don't need a monster like you are now anywhere on my property. Nott can take you if He wants you like this. Now, are you going to relax so I can do this without slicing you?" Hermione nodded dumbly and forced herself to relax.
He slowly peeled the black leather gloves from his pale hands and picked up the blade in one long artist's hand and carefully sliced down the front of Hermione's filthy shirt. The blade passed through the fabric with almost no difficulty, and Hermione's chest was bared, her bra long destroyed by over-zealous rapists. Their bruising handprints still marked her pale breasts. His eyes passed over the marks, noting them then moving on as he cut her sleeves away revealing skin lumpy and discoloured from bruises and broken bones. He started on her battered jeans, cutting them away to reveal her gaunt naked pelvis and groin.
"Your underwear?" he asked softly as he cut down the leg of her jeans.
"Banished. They got in the way of some of your friends' aims." She commented acidly. She briefly wondered why she dared to talk to him like this.
"They're not my friends." He replied as he cut up the inside leg of her jeans. "They're lackeys. Called that because they lack just about everything." He stepped back and raised his wand. Hermione braced herself. "Mobilicorpus." Hermione felt herself levitating and tried to keep still despite the odd sensation of the bed falling away from underneath her. He gathered her shredded clothes from underneath her, then lowered her back down again. "Now." He said. "Tell me as much as you can about whats wrong with you." Hermione stared at him in amazement.
"I would have thought that was obvious." She commented drily. Somehow, odd as it was, lying in front of him as helpless and naked as the day she was born didn't seem to worry her. Mind you, what could he do to her that the others hadnt?
"The bones in my hands, feet, shoulders, hips, knees and ankles are all dislocated. Madeleine thought that the one-by-one approach might make me talk."
"And did it?" he asked as he grasped her foot in his hands and squeezed. She gasped as the bones popped back into place.
"No. I was unconscious after my second shoulder." She shrugged with a wince, then gave a shriek of pain as he squeezed her other foot back into place.
"What else?" He asked, looking up at her face. "Besides the rack damage."
"Broken ribs. Jawbone feels sore, not entirely sure how intact it is."
"You're talking well enough." He commented with a nod. "Continue."
"Other parts of me hurt more." She rationalised. "Broken bones in both my legs, my left arm…and I think my skull is collapsing – they were rather fond of banging it against stone walls, like that would improve my memory or something."
"Well…deatheaters are not necessarily known for their brains." He rolled his eyes. "Anything else?"
"Couple of crucios. I think they found imperio rather amusing too."
"Quite a little catelogue you've got there." He commented, gesturing with his wand over her bared body. "On top of those – you were right, by the way – you've got internal bleeding. Your lung is tearing and you've got all sorts of confused organs. So I can fix most of those with magic."
"Most?" Hermione asked, struggling to raise her head from the white pillow and failing. "What do you mean? Magic can fix just about everything!"
"Coupled with potions." He added. "Seeing as I'm not an apothecary, nor do I have the necessaries to make myself one, I shall simply have to fix what I can and do the rest…another way." Hermione nodded, though she wondered what 'another way' was. "So, are you ready?" she nodded again, and he began muttering under his breath, his wand still suspended over her torso. There was an awful sqwelching sound as something happened to her internal organs, and it felt like there was a pit of snakes located in her belly that writhed and coiled under her skin. When it subsided, she sighed in relief. He glanced at her, one eyebrow raised in silent question, and she nodded. "Bones next." He ran the tip of his wand along the inside of both her legs and along the underside of her left arm, and she felt the breaks knitting back together. She smiled in relief, but he didn't return the gesture. "I'm going to realign your joints now, but this will hurt." He warned. She took a deep breath and then let it go.
"Okay."
He started at her hips and she clenched her teeth to keep from crying out as her leg bones grated over her hip bones before audibly popping back into the sockets. She let her breath go in a ragged exhale.
"Are you okay?"
"Keep going." She said flatly.
"Ankles." As the bones grated, Hermione groaned through her teeth, her eyes closing and her head falling back onto the pillow. She felt his hand on hers and she curled her disjointed fingers around his, regardless of the burning agony that raced through them at the gesture.
"Shoulders." Again he performed the spell, and Hermione hissed as her grip on his hand tightened, the pain in her hand distracting her from the pain in her shoulders that raced across her shoulders and up her neck. She let out a sigh, and he gripped her hand tightly and her eyes jerked open. "Hermione! Stay conscious." It was a flat order, and Hermione allowed her gaze to lock on his as he partly turned his torso to face her knees. "Last one. Knees." Still holding her gaze he performed the spell and Hermione gasped, her lips parting as she shakily took a sharp inward breath. "Done." He let her hand drop onto the bed.
"Ribs." It was remarkable, Hermione thought, even as she arched off the bed as her ribs knitted themselves back together again, that she was naked before him and he was so impersonal. Granted, she was starved, and bruised, dirty and a mess…Madeleine may be a woman but she was hardly sympathetic, but still. The first (and last) time Harry had seen her it had been the standard fifteen-year-old boy reaction. Silence, awe, horniness. But now…her saviour's cool hands ran the length of her torso, over her hips and down her legs, completely impersonal to the fact that she was, beneath the mess that had been inflicted on her, a pretty young woman. Even if the only place her beauty was currently apparent was the defiant shine in her eyes.
"Just your hands now." He gently lifted her so she was sitting up, leaning against the headboard. He took one hand in his own. "Are you ready?" she nodded, and he squeezed, gently at first, then tightly and savagely and she groaned, squeezing her eyes shut as she felt the individual bones in her hands pop back into place. He tenderly laid her hand on the bed and reached for her other hand. She gave it to him, and this time, the pain was immediately as his hand closed, lightning-fast, with merciless pressure. She shrieked at the sudden pain, and then it was over, though her hands still throbbed.
"Is that it?" she asked, from a very dry throat. He nodded. "I thought you said you couldn't fix it all by magic."
"I didn't. your hands and feet will be very sore for quite a while." He shrugged. "It was the best I could do." She nodded.
"So besides them, I'm all better?"
"No. While I managed to fix your broken bones and put the joints back in their sockets, the bones themselves will be very weak for a time. You'll have to go very slowly with them, and be patient." She nodded.
"I can do that."
"Can you? Besides that, you'll as good as need to learn to walk again, how to write. It's not easy."
"I've done this." She said determidly. "I did not just lie through half an hour of agony to lie in bed for the rest of my life." He smiled, and she frowned, suddenly looking thoughtful. "Why are you being so…nice?" He sighed.
"Hermione, something I've learnt that the others havent quite grasped yet is that the whole concept of purebloods and mudbloods is deeply flawed." Hermione gaped at him. "No, it's true." He insisted. "Clearly there is some magical blood somewhere in you, since you're a witch. So clearly mudblood, in your case at least, is incorrect. In fact, the only mudbloods are muggles, and who'd waste time calling them names?" he chuckled. "Anyway, purebloods may not have any muggles or half-bloods sixteen or so generations back, or whatever, but that's not to say there isnt one in the seventeenth generation back, or even the twentieth. Who knows? And blood is blood, regardless. Red, runny…lose too much of it and you die. Simple as that." Hermione couldn't seem to close her mouth.
"You've changed your tune." She said finally.
"Not so much. That's not the kind of philosophy you spout in front of deatheaters. Scourify." He watched as Hermione's skin and hair cleaned themselves, then went to the chest of drawers across the room and withdrew a white cotton nightdress. He turned back to Hermione and slid it over her bare form, his hands cool against her bare skin. "It will take several weeks, maybe even months to learn how to use your limbs properly again." He said, sitting back against the bedpost and watching her calmly. She frowned.
"But why? The muscles are all there, the bones are in working order…what's wrong?"
"The spell weakens them. They'll strengthen again, don't worry. It'll just take time. So in the meantime you have to be careful, and gentle, and patient with them or they could end up broken again." She nodded.
They sat in silence for a while, Hermione taking in her surroundings, conscious of the way he sat there and simply watched her in silence. It was unnerving, the way he just steadily stared at her. Finally, she roused herself.
"What's the date?" she asked finally, giving into the burning quesiton that kept crossing her mind.
"The ninth of September." He answered, his gaze remaining steadily on her face.
"Everyone's back at school, then." She commented. He nodded.
"The Dark Lord has arranged for you to continue your studies, so he has bought all the relevant textbooks you will need, for this year and the next. He has heard of your insistent learning patterns, and didn't want you to be…bored, I think. As soon as you're more able you'll receive those."
"So…hold on." Hermione paused, gathering her thoughts. "So…everyone was at home, then, while I was here."
"Yes…" He paused, his eyes narrowed. Then he understood. "Ah, yes. Yes, Draco was at home."
"He was? And did he know I'd taken up residence in your dungeon?" Hermione asked sharply. He grinned.
"Of course not. He was told that the dungeons were undergoing work to strengthen them, so he stayed out of the way. And there was the dragon as well, which I've found will put him off when he tries to stick his nose in where it doesn't belong." Hermione licked her lips thoughtfully. There was an odd thought – that life had carried on as usual while she had been tortured in the dungeon. There must have been some pretty good silencing spells on those dungeons – Hermione knew she had screamed quite a lot.
"What does he want with me?" She asked quietly.
"Draco?"
"No!" Hermione rolled her eyes. "Voldemort. What does he want?"
"It's the Dark Lord to you, Hermione, unless you want to be punished." He warned. She sighed.
"The Dark Lord then, what does he want? He doesn't want me dead, clearly, and surely it's obvious where Harry is."
"Now, yes, Potter is at Hogwarts. But during the holidays…where he stays then is a closely guarded secret."
"And he thinks I'm going to tell him?" Hermione laughed. "I spent three months getting torn limb from limb, getting whipped, burnt, starved…and he thinks healing me will make me tell him?"
"You didn't tell me you were whipped and starved." He focussed in on her. "Where?"
"My back, mostly." Hermione shrugged. "It's all healed over now."
"Let me see." He ordered. She sat up and with his help pulled the nightdress over her head, and he looked at her scarred back, before pulling the nightdress back down and sitting back. "You're right – it has healed over. Though you do have some pretty ugly scars back there."
"Looks arent everything, I guess." She smiled wryly. "Either way, Madeleine failed to get anything out of me and you will too."
"Madeleine lacks everything but a cruel nature." He observed. "Anyone who knows anything about you or your friends knows that brute force will only result in stubborn silence. Gryffindors are all the same."
"Oh, and you know us all so well, do you?" Hermione said archly.
"No, I said anyone who knows anything. And I know a few things." He shrugged elegantly. "I'll leave you to your thoughts for now." He stood and picked up the leather gloves from the bedsiode table and turned for the door.
"Wait." Hermione called out. He paused and pivoted slightly to look at her. "Can I have my school books, please? Seeing as it appears I'm going to be bedridden for a while." He nodded, a slow smile spreading across his face.
"Of course. But for now…sleep. Then I'll have them sent up."
Hermione snuggled painfully under the covers, her limbs all sore and burning, though she found that as long as she didn't move to much it didn't hurt so bad. She heard the door click shut behind him, and then she let her eyes close, leaving her in calm, quite darkness.
Sleep.
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