Fourteen: Twilight
Hermione dressed in a simple, black shift for dinner, coupled with high-heeled, strappy black sandals and large, silver hoop earrings, and wrangled her hair into a loose tail at the nape of her neck. A touch of lipstick and eyeliner, and voilà, dressy casual. She realised, as the clock on the mantelpiece started to read nearer to six-thirty, that she hadn’t any idea where this dinner was. At six forty five, she was getting a little nervous, when there was a knock at the door.
She glanced up from her pacing on the furry rug. She hesitated, wondering who it might be, and then understood that the French Ministry must have sent an escort for her. She sighed, relieved, and went to the door, barely thinking before she opened it.
The second she did open it, she wished she hadn’t.
"Good evening, Hermione Granger." Lucius Malfoy smirked nastily down at her, advantaged with his considerably greater height. Hermione stared. There was barely time for the facts to register before stupefy hit her and the world went black.
***
Malfoy manner. The coldest, meanest, darkest –in both the literal and metaphorical sense –place that Hermione could ever end up at, and ever not want to be at. She woke up chained and immensely uncomfortable, but glad and admittedly surprised to still have her clothes intact, at least at the home of the notorious pervert himself, Lucius Malfoy.
That was the odd thing, though. Lucius Malfoy had supposedly been arrested. Hermione knew because it was mostly her fault that he had been. But so was everything else. All Hermione understood about anything right now was that this could not possibly be right. She could also comprehend the dimness of this dungeon, and the cuffs locked around her wrists. Then she realised why she was here. Malfoy wanted to get back at her.
Hermione swore under her breath, knowing precisely what the French Ministry would think if she didn’t show up at dinner. At the most they’d be offended, but they were already pissed at the British Ministry for no reason except for a want of someone to blame, and they’d be more angry if the British Ambassador showed so little respect for them.
"Fuck," Hermione muttered again, bitter as citric acid.
Half-heartedly she pulled at the chains, but they were firmly locked around her wrists and even more steadfastly secured to the wall. Hermione gave up and looked hopelessly at the floor, until her eyes developed a rather glazed appearance and her thoughts drifted in harsh space.
Then the door opened, casting a blinding yellow light into the room, and she looked up. The undoubted silhouette of Lucius Malfoy filled the doorway, and then entered. He closed the door behind him, and then cast a muttered spell to light the torches in their sconces on the walls. Hermione glared at his decidedly triumphant smirk.
"How the might have fallen, eh?" Malfoy asked, eyes sadistically gleeful.
"How did you do it?" asked Hermione, biting off each word.
"Escape from Azkaban, you mean? Well," Lucius said. "It was difficult, yes, but the Dementors are still quite loyal to Voldemort, be he dead or not, and heartless as they are I convinced them of my own loyalty to the late Dark Lord."
"If I ever heard a more half-assed lie –" Hermione started, but Malfoy only laughed.
"Did you expect me to tell you how I really escaped? To tell you how I escaped from prison would only make your story more believable.
"No one will believe you if you say merely, ‘Oh, boo hoo, I was captured by Lucius Malfoy!’ because as far as the Ministry’s concerned, I’m still in Azkaban. If I told you how I got out, you’d have a plausible story, and I’d go back," said Malfoy. He sounded immensely pleased with himself. "And obviously I don’t want to do that."
"Why did you capture me?" asked Hermione next. Malfoy looked even more pleased with himself.
"Well, to be perfectly honest, I was going capture Fudge, stir things up a bit, you know, but when a little bird told me that Severus Snape was madly in love with you, I had an epiphany.
"I said to myself, Snape’s nearly as rich as I was before they threw me into prison. Now, if I capture his little whore, I could get paid ransom. So, I found out where you were –took quite a bit of effort, actually, in case you’re curious –and the rest is probably obvious," said Malfoy.
Hermione narrowed her eyes, both offended by having been called a whore, and also ready to hear the whole story. It was Malfoy’s weakness to flaunt his cleverness. She wasn’t going to deny that he was admittedly clever, but it was something wasted on so evil a man.
"Why," she said, without making it a question. Actually, she was also wondering who in the hell had told Malfoy about Snape.
Lucius rolled his eyes. "You always ask questions that you aren’t going to get the answer to. It’s actually rather pathetic."
"Who told you." She apparently had a thing about making questions into statements.
"About you and Sev? Well, Draco, of course," said Lucius nonchalantly.
"He didn’t know," said Hermione. "And he wouldn’t tell you, anyway. At least not willingly." Strange that she should find herself defending Draco Malfoy, the boy who allegedly had hated anyone muggle-born for the earlier half of his life.
"It’s called Veritaserum, stupid," Lucius said, in a tone that said that Hermione was dumber than dirt. "And as to him not knowing, you ought to put that mind that everyone thinks is so fabulous to work.
"Despite belief to the contrary, my son actually does have a brain, and he has eyes, as well, with which he could see you going to the dungeons in the evenings. He can put two and two together, especially when you practically told him."
For hating Draco, Lucius seemed willing enough to support his son. And willing to describe how smart he himself was, talking about his past plans as though trying to impress her. The thought was palpable, ‘See? You aren’t the only so-called clever one, mudblood. In fact, compared to me, you’re a regular moron.’
Hermione frowned at him. "So, you were willing to capture me just to get Severus’ money?"
"Well, that and I hate the man," said Lucius, almost wistfully.
"Did you just come down here to flaunt your superior intellect?" asked Hermione dryly. Lucius ignored the sarcasm, and smirked at her devilishly.
"You wound me, my dear. How could you have forgotten?"
Hermione had been worried he’d say something insolent like that. She screwed her eyes shut as Malfoy approached, unwilling to let the fear show. But the smirk of Malfoy was obvious to her until he left her cold and naked and bruised, the door clanging loudly shut behind him. Hermione sobbed quietly.
She really did hate that man.
The ransom letter arrived on Wednesday. Snape stared at it in horror, blinked, and then stared at it again, petrified. He almost didn’t believe it. He had only seen Hermione a few days ago, and everything had been perfectly all right then. Nothing had been wrong. And now she had been captured by some unknown person, probably someone incurably evil, and this person wanted two hundred thousand galleons for her.
Two hundred thousand wasn’t a lot, really, but it would leave a significant dent in his funds. She was worth it, but Snape would feel better if he could simply rescue her. Of course, that was probably just some sort of romantic fantasy, but he wanted to make sure that she would be safe; if he just paid a sum of money, her captor didn’t have to give her back.
One thing was for sure. He had to inform Dumbledore.
"It’s the classic ‘leave the money in a paper bag by the oak tree in the park’ scenario," was what Dumbledore said. Severus raised an eyebrow, having very little idea as to what Dumbledore was talking about.
"Except for in this case it is far more descriptive. Now it’s ‘leave the money in a brown sack under the table in the farthest corner from the door in the Leaky Cauldron on February thirteenth,’" the headmaster went on. "The first obvious thing is that whoever captured her has never read a muggle mystery novel. The second obvious thing is that what we have to do is to leave the money, and then spy on it. Discreetly, of course."
"Discretion is the first rule of spying," said Severus, cottoning on. "So, we should send in an Auror or two beforehand, and perhaps they should check for suspicious characters. Then I could go in and put the money where it belongs, and then leave. When the captor arrives, the Aurors arrest him, and we find out his identity and force him to tell us where Hermione is."
"Precisely," said Dumbledore. He surveyed Severus as a professor surveys a favourite student, with pride for their intellect.
"You really do have a very keen mind," Dumbledore remarked distantly. "Alike to our Miss Granger’s."
Severus nodded, jaw clenched slightly. He met Dumbledore’s gaze evenly. "I just want her back, Albus."
So, the day before Valentine’s Day found two of the Ministry’s most skilled Aurors –by the names of Seamus Finnigan and Elle Underhill –pretending to have a drink together in the Leaky Cauldron. They were, in reality, watching a table that hid underneath it an eye-popping amount of money in a humble, little cloth sack.
Seamus was the one who saw the figure first, a tall person wearing a robe that swallowed them whole, and effectively hid their true identity. They went straight to the table at the farthest corner from the door to the pub, and looked around furtively, at which point Seamus pretended to be fascinated with his coffee, before checking underneath the table. Seamus glanced up, and then pointed out the person to Elle.
"Let’s go," she said. Seamus nodded.
They approached the person, who had just taken the sack out from underneath the table. The two Aurors were right behind the person before he turned around, and when he did, he took out his wand. Before he could do anything, though, Seamus drew his own wand, using lightning-quick reflexes.
"Expelliarmus!"
He caught the wand easily, and then Elle waved her wand and said a few words. Two lengths of rope shot out of the end of her rope, and bound itself around the culprit’s hands and feet. He fell backwards into the seat at the table. Seamus pushed back the deep hood of the voluminous black robes, and raised his eyebrows in surprise upon seeing who the person was.
"Lucius Malfoy?" he said. He shook his head of bewilderment, and lifted his wand to point it at Malfoy’s chest. Malfoy looked angry as a bull about to be let into the ring.
"You expected prince charming?" he snapped, his grey eyes flashing indignantly. Seamus frowned.
"It’s back to Azkaban with you, sir," he said nastily. "But before then, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do."
Malfoy proved unconventionally easy to deal with, though, giving Hermione’s location, sounding sufficiently defeated when he did so. Snape glared at Malfoy for the entire time they interrogated the criminal, his arms crossed over his chest and a frown etched firmly into his features. He should have expected it to be him, the nasty, pathetic jackass. He didn’t deserve Azkaban; he just deserved death.
When Severus went to "rescue" Hermione not an hour later, he was outraged at what he found.
"Hermione?" he said, entering the dungeon. He pushed open the door, with its tiny, barred window in the middle. He paused when he entered, standing aghast in the doorway.
Petrified, he gazed at her, bound and broken on the floor. Rage swelled irrepressibly in his chest. How dare he, that lowlife, half-witted… He would kill him. Merlin’s beard, he was going to kill that man.
Severus rushed to Hermione’s side, and cradled her in his arms. The woman seemed to come out of a trance, and returned her lover’s embrace, tears streaming down her face.
"I t-thought you’d never come," she said, burying her face in his shoulder, gasping for breath as she sobbed.
"I would never leave you to torment and death," said Severus, holding her gently. He wrapped his outer robe around her, covering her nakedness. At her pathetic whimper as she reached for him, he pulled her back to him, letting her latch onto him and cry as much as she wanted. Severus would strangle Malfoy with his bare hands. He knew what that louse had done to Hermione, and he hated Malfoy all the more for it.
Hermione touched his face with delicate fingers, her eyes painfully blank, without emotion. Then she looked away. "I want to go home," she whispered.
Severus nodded. And naturally, he took her back to Hogwarts. After all, she had asked to go home.
Hermione had healed mostly after a day and a half, but she was doing everything with a sort of emptiness. She ate little, and meandered as though lost around the castle, sometimes stopping to watch a class from the back of the classroom, silent with a sort of sick nostalgia written on her features.
Percy, after hearing what had happened, had resolved to go to France himself and clear everything up, giving Hermione a few days off. Hermione had decided to spend these days at Hogwarts, simply because it was the one place where she felt safe at all. It was home. But now she felt sort of lost, deep in thought, debating a decision that she didn’t want to make.
Severus knew that she was hiding something from him, but he wasn’t sure how to go about asking her what it was. Fortunately, he ended up not having to confront her about it, because she came to him on the matter a few days later.
"Severus… do you know any potions that could… well, abort an unborn child?" she asked, lacking the eloquence she usually had. Snape gazed at her, unsure of what to say. She looked unusually small, and mournful. He wanted her smile back, and he realised how much he ached when she felt unhappy.
"Are you sure you want to?" he asked quietly. Hermione, misty-eyed, nodded resolutely. Gods, how badly she wanted to cry.
"Yes. And it’s my baby, anyway; I can do what I want with it," she said, a little sharply.
Snape wanted to stop her. He wanted to force her to see it through, damn what Malfoy had done. But he knew her emotions were fragile, and he loved her that much; she could do what she wanted. Besides, what was this child to him? All he had done was sleep with her. He didn’t know what she was going through, and had no right to force her to do anything.
"I’ll have the potion ready by tomorrow morning," he said quietly, standing rigidly over her. "Is that all right for you?"
Hermione confirmed it with a nod. She hadn’t looked at him for this entire time, preferring to keep her head down. She felt guilty, dirty and unable to clean herself of the foulness that had graced her. She wanted to be clean, and that meant erasing any evidence that she had had sex at all in her life. And it meant stopping this mad affair with Severus. It would have died out quickly, anyway.
Sad as she was to do it, that meant casting forth the child that she would have borne, too. Besides, it would be too difficult for her to just leave her life to raise a child. Yes, this was for the best.
Severus slid a gentle finger under her chin, and lifted her eyes to his, black piercing chocolate brown.
"Are you all right, Hermione?" he asked, sounding genuinely concerned. Hermione wished he wouldn’t worry so much. It made her feel too vulnerable.
Hermione nodded silently, swallowing the painful lump in her throat. "I’m fine," she whispered. Severus clearly didn’t believe her, but he didn’t say anything. He merely inclined his head once in what Hermione assumed was a nod.
"Right," he said, taking his hand away. Hermione wanted to get away from him, now. It was getting too uncomfortable.
Hermione turned to leave, but then seemed to remember something. "Thank you," she said, looking at Severus. "For your help, that is."
Severus nodded. "Anytime."
Oh, God. If only he had said something different. Hermione turned and walked out of his classroom. Upon returning to the guest quarters where she was staying until she went back to London, she promptly burst into tears.