A.N. So yeah, it has been a long time hasn't it? I'm sorry! I have had much more than my fair share of excitement lately and my beta has had a good bit as well. I will tell you about it if you would like to hear, but for now let's get on with the story, yes?

Disclaimer: You know the drill? Must I keep doing this? If it isn't canon, it's mine.

08-29-2013 There aren't any real changes to this chapter.

Draco swore and quickly clamped his eyes closed again to hide them from the light. Someone had left the curtains open and the sunlight sent stabs of pain through his already tortured skull. His whole body throbbed and ached in a feeling that he could only compare to the aftermath of being trampled by a herd of hippogriffs. Not that he knew what that felt like, but he imagined it wasn't a stroll through the spring meadows. While his eyes adjusted to the light Draco peered up from the bed. All he could see was the shadows of leaves and branches of trees dancing across the soft yellow canopy above him. They held his attention for approximately three seconds before his sanity demanded something more interesting. He was never one to just lay about in bed. It used to drive him crazy whenever he got sick or hurt and had to spend any great amount of time resting.

Draco clenched his teeth against the pain as he tried to push himself into a sitting position but he got no more than half way before his arms gave out and he fell back to the bed. He cursed at his own weakness and rested for as long as his patience would allow – about four more seconds – before he tried again.

Again and again he tried to sit up until he was exhausted and more than a bit shaky. He swiped at the fine layer of sweat on his brow with more force than necessary, but his condition had him on the brink. Draco prided himself in the fact that he was not a weak person, at least physically and treated any sort of illness or injury as a personal insult.

While he tried to catch his breath Draco tried to remember how he had ended up in this position. The last thing etched into his memory was strange laughter echoing through his head and then all he could register was pain. He tried to think of what happened before, but his mind was oddly blank. Draco wracked his brain for the memories but as soon as they seemed within his grasp they floated away again. It was like trying to hold on to water. He chased after the memories with all of the concentration he could muster and after what felt like hours all he had to show for it was a splitting migraine. This only served to make him more determined to get up. He needed answers and the first order of business was figuring out where there hell he was.

Draco worked himself up again and was very nearly drenched in sweat by the time none other than Hermione Granger flounced into the room like she owned the place. She gasped, raised his wand and trained it straight at him. Draco paused in his attempt to get up and stared back at her; his shock mirrored on her face.

"Uh. Hi." she said.

She shook herself and the look of shock melted into a guarded mask and Draco could see her knuckles whiten around his wand. Even though he was decidedly uncomfortable with her having his want, it was more than a little musing.

Draco let out a low chuckle. "Honestly Granger, is that how you are going to greet me? Good morning to you too." He watched as her face slipped back into a look of confusion at his words, but disregarded it. "Speaking of greetings, what are you doing here? And why do you have my wand?"

He watched her with an smirk plastered on his face as she struggled to speak. Her mouth opened and closed several times like a fish out of water until she managed to collect her wits.

"Are you mad," she asked. The little squeak in her voice did not escape his notice.

"Last time I checked, no. But you on the other hand I am not so sure. What in the bloody hell are you doing here. I have not seen or spoken to you in years and to tell you the truth, I quite liked that arrangement. You entirely too confrontational for my liking."

Hermione scowled at him and he saw the wand in her had twitch. "What are you on about, Malfoy? I have no patience for you at the moment. You know very well why and how we came to be here considering it's your own bloody fault."

Draco's arms finally gave out from the strain of holding him half up and he fell back down to the pillows. "Well, you see Granger," he said tiredly, "That's just the thing. I don't know. I am not sure I care to know. However, I feel like this is going to be interesting so could you be a dear and enlighten me as to what's going on?"

Hermione was seething. Whatever game he was playing was only making her more angry, and a little bit afraid. His whole apathy to the situation was unnerving. What she had gone through was not something that could be dismissed so quickly. As messed up as it was, Hermione wanted him to own up, to try and lord what he had done over her, anything. Maybe there was a possibility that he had lost his memory. To be fair, she had absolutely no reason to trust him, but there was only one way to find out whether he was lying or not.

"Malfoy, I am tired of this. I will give you one more chance to tell the truth and give me one good reason not to kill you and save myself the torture of your presence." She stepped away from him, mindful to keep the wand between them and out of his reach. "And frankly, you owe me considering I saved you from that Death Eater in your office. So get over yourself and tell me where exactly we are and how I can contact Harry."

Draco sighed and closed his eyes. "However much I would love to answer those questions, I can't. I don't remember anything of what happened. You are going to have to figure that out for yourself."

Hermione stomped her foot in a rare childish display of rage and spoke through clenched teeth.

"How in the world do you think I would believe that you have no idea where we are? You are the one who led me here. Are you seriously going to continue this ridiculousness?" Her voice rose higher and louder with each word until she was nearly screaming at him. But it didn't matter. He just laid there, unmoved by her words.

"Yes, Granger, I do expect you to believe me." There was a few moments of silence before all of Hermione's control broke and she lunged forward to take hold of Malfoy's shirt collar. Her hands shook with rage and she barely suppressed the urge to throttle him when he opened his eyes and glared at her with disdain.

"You prat! You wiped your memories on purpose, didn't you?" Hermione was practically screaming into his face and he barely reacted. She began to shake him. "Why? Why did you do it? You know, it won't protect you."

With that Hermione released him with a violent shove and stepped away from him. It was becoming to hard to control her anger. The stress of it all had pushed her to the edge. She should have known that the bastard would try and find some way to preserve himself, but she couldn't for the life of her figure out why he had saved her and insisted that she take him with her. And then there was the matter of the fever. Hermione was definitely past her patience level with the whole situation so she decided on a more rash course of action. Without giving him any time to react, she raised his wand and aimed it at his forehead.

"Legilimens." Hermione caught him off guard, so she easily swatted away the barriers around his mind and tore through his memories without remorse or hesitation. She scoured his mind callously for his memories of torturing her, of the moments in his office leading up to when he had collapsed from the pain and fever. But she could find nothing but a strange gray mist. Hermione had never seen anything like this in anyone's mind before and it rubbed her the wrong way. No one could do this to themselves. It was possible for someone to repress memories for sure and if they knew the correct spell it was even possible to erase them. However, the strange fog was new to her. The characteristic scarring of memory removal was absent as well. It didn't feel like memory altering magic, but she could sense the magical trace of someone else's tampering. Her mind went back to the office and the spell from the Death Eater.

With a little more heed to his condition Hermione tried to search further back, to find any memories of his time as the new Dark Lord. As she encountered only mist Hermione became more and more frantic. She sped through his mind at a speed that was so disorienting that she felt the bile begin to rise in the back of her throat and she had to steady herself on one of the bed posts.

Eventually she pushed past the mist and found herself in a study that she recognized as one of the rooms in Malfoy Manor. She had had the distinct pleasure of combing through the Manor with Harry and a few other Aurors after the end of the war look for objects of Dark magic, so the elegant sitting room was familiar. She watched as a much younger Malfoy entered the room and crossed to one of the heavily curtained windows. He drew back the curtains and just stood there, gazing into a splendid Victorian style garden, until his mother had entered and rested her small hand on his shoulder. Hermione watched in shock as the younger Malfoy turned slowly towards his mother and she could see the tears falling silently down his cheeks. Hermione left the memory very quickly, a bit ashamed at stumbling into a memory so personal. She was also more than uncomfortable seeing Malfoy display any kind of human emotion.

She back tracked and searched again for any other recent memories, unrelated to any of his dark dealings, but Hermione still only found nothing but the strange mist. As she retracted her probe she admitted to herself, albeit begrudgingly, that Malfoy had been telling the truth and he had not wiped his own memories.

As the room came back into focus the first thing that greeted her was the ice cold glare of one Draco Malfoy. She felt her face flush a bit with shame and she broke eye contact quickly to settle her gaze at the floor. After a few moments of silence she finally mustered the courage to speak.

"You weren't lying." Her voice was hardly a whisper, but he heard her nonetheless. Malfoy chuckled mirthlessly and she lifted her eyes to meet his disdainful look.

"I do believe that is what I told you right before you decided it would be a good idea to go digging around in my head." Hermione's spine stiffened at the spiteful tone of his voice and raised her chin defiantly.

"After what you have put me through I have every right to treat you this way. You deserve no better treatment." Malfoy sputtered and looked at her as if she had grown three heads.

"Really," he scoffed. "And what could I have possibly done to deserve you raking through my mind, and in the process giving me the migraine of the century I'll have you know, and treating me like some king of criminal?"

Now it was Hermione's turn to sputter. She lost what little control remained on her temper and began to scream at him again.

"Some kind of criminal! That is exactly what you are you vile, evil son of a bitch! I don't even know why I saved you! I should have left you to your disgusting followers and let them tear you limb from limb, but that would have been too lax a punishment for you. You deserve nothing. Not mercy, not consideration, not empathy. The only reason you are alive now is because you had information that would have helped us undo all of the evil that you've done over the past years. And now you don't even have that! Once I find a way to access those memories there will be no use for you and I will not protect you. There is no punishment fitting enough for your crimes."

As she yelled at him, Hermione could see the blood drain out of his face as he stared at her in confusion and horror. He made her sick. He could have done so much more with his life. She had never felt so disappointed in someone in her entire life. Without another word or glance in his direction she stomped out of the room and slammed the door shut with all of the strength that she could muster.

For a long time Draco just stared at the door Granger had fled through. He had no idea what she was talking about, but from what he could gather he was even less eager to find out. Draco didn't know what he had done to make Granger so angry. For a moment, right before she left, he would have sworn that she was going to kill him. But instead she had given him such a look of hatred that it shook him to the core.

Draco closed his eyes and tried to think through the migraine. He had to remember, but at the same time he was afraid of what he would find if he could push past the spell hiding his memories. He clenched his teeth until, with a quiet groan, the pain forced him to release his concentration. Draco relaxed his body into the bed. Between trying to fight off Granger's Legilimens and then trying to fight through the spell on his mind, he had worn himself out. He wanted nothing more than to sleep.

Hermione stalked from Malfoy's room down to the corner she had set up for herself downstairs in the main library, muttering angrily and gesticulated wildly to herself the whole way. "Gah," she threw her hands up into the air.

"Leave it to Malfoy to get me into this sort of situation! He had to have set that up on purpose to protect his movement. This is all too easy." She slammed her hand against the wall as she pounded down the stairs.

"But he couldn't have done it to himself. I found traces of a different magical signature." Hermione paused at the bottom of the stairs for a moment, lost in thought before she continued her stalking.

"Okay, so maybe he planned this whole thing ever since I was captured. He could have had someone waiting for the right moment to wipe his memory. But why?" Hermione sank into the chair she had claimed with another frustrated sigh.

"Maybe he knew all along that I would probably be rescued and wanted to protect himself if he was captured?" Hermione shook her head. There was no way that Malfoy could think that he would get off scotch free if he never remembered committing any crimes. Besides, he would never have rescued her first, if he thought that her friends could come after her.

Hermione gave up on that train of thought. She could speculate about his actions and motivations all day and she knew that it would get her nowhere so she turned her attentions to the spell itself. From what she had seen from his mind, the memories seemed more hidden than anything. She tried to think of a spell that would be capable of doing something like that. Nothing that she had come across in any of her books was anywhere near powerful enough. Hermione slammed her fist against the padded arm of the chair.

"These things just don't happen out of no where. I have to be right! He is up to something." With that Hermione resolved to find out exactly what his plans where, but the first order of business was most definitely getting his memory back. There was a reason he didn't want them and thwarting his plans was something that she had not had the singular pleasure of engaging in since their school days.

Hermione strode over to the bookshelves and began pulling book after book from the shelves. When she couldn't carry them all anymore she just began levitating the stack beside her until she was satisfied with her collection. She made her way out of the large network of shelves and lowered the small mountain of book onto one of the work tables, ignoring the wood creaked under the weight. Without missing a beat, Hermione gathered writing materials from a nearby cabinet and settled down with the first book.

Hours later Hermione dropped her head onto the opened book in front of her. She had lost all of the energy from her previous temper explosion and was quite exhausted from all of the dead ends in her research. Not even the expansive library could give her the answers she was looking for. She had taken a break on the Malfoy issue a long while back and was now looking for a way to contact Harry. She knew she couldn't communicate with him by any conventional means after a few tests on Malfoy's wards. The man had to have been more than a little paranoid to make his safe house virtually impenetrable from either the inside or the outside. There wasn't even a floo system.

She relaxed onto the desk and drifted as her body gave in to her weariness. She whispered a silent wish that this time she could sleep without dreams. Even after all of the potions she had given herself from the stores, Hermione was still recovering from her torture and her nightmares had been awful. A simple dosage of a dreamless sleep potion would suffice, but they were also addictive.

Dreams. Dreams! That's it! Hermione shot out of her chair and practically ran to one of the bookshelves. She remembered reading about a spell for dream-walking, but it was so intricate and borderline Dark that she had immediately dismissed it. She scanned quickly through the titles until she found the ancient looking tome near the back of the library. Hermione spelled all of the other books and papers back to their proper places and plopped the massive book onto her desk.

A.N. This chapter has quite a bit going on. I hope that it was to your liking. Let me know your likes, dislikes or conjectures. Reviews are much, much appreciated.

Thank you to all of you that have read, reviewed, and added this fic to your favorite/alerts! I love every single one of you. Thanks for sticking with me!

Also thank you once again to my amazing beta, Mistwood! Be sure to check out her new fic. It is most excellent.

xoxo

Summer Orchid