Chapter Text
Dancing dust motes tickled Hermione’s nose, spinning away from her frantic fingers in the dark. She scrabbled at the lock on the blacked-out window, thin hands weak and depleted. They’d be back any minute— this would likely be her only chance for weeks. She wasn’t often left alone in the house.
Aside from the scrape of her fingers, barely audible huffs were the only sound that betrayed Hermione’s desperation. Although she was alone, her disciplined silence maintained a death grip on her throat. Silence didn’t entirely prevent pain, but any expression from her guaranteed it.
Wandless and depleted, she predictably didn’t make much headway at the window. They’d been expecting this– she was the “Brightest Witch of Her Age” after all. Not that her jailors cared much for her talents. Each summer Hermione returned home from Hogwarts, her parents made it increasingly difficult to reenter the wizarding world. Despite her propensity for magic, her exceptional grades, and the sheer joy it brought, her parents’ faith would not allow them to see her gifts as anything less than demonic. Something to be isolated, exterminated, and broken from her.
And broken she was– starvation had not done her favors. She’d stopped eating a couple weeks ago when she noticed the food was laced. The first day of her captivity, she could do a bit of wandless magic, just a bluebell flame. After a couple meals, her efforts to produce her precious bluebell flames were empty. A sickly, clotted sensation wrapped around her magical core, and exhausted her beyond anything she’d ever felt before. Now, she could only manage small bursts of weak movement. Despite her hunger strike, she could still feel that her magical core hadn’t recovered. Her parents must have help, of a most unsavory kind.
Hermione fell back from the window with a distraught and uncharacteristically sloppy “thump”. I shouldn’t have come back, she thought. But the letters this year had been so promising. Her parents had actually apologized; begged her forgiveness in fact. They regretted every blow, every lie, every condemnation, every week trapped and isolated with only prayer and falsehoods for comfort.
What a fucking load of bollocks that was. Harry and Ron had been skeptical, but in the end, she’d swayed them to see things her way. They couldn’t have known. Hermione kept some parts of her home life close to her chest, because she knew that if her friends knew the full extent of her parents’ capabilities, it would break their hearts. Harry especially had enough to worry about. What are two muggles compared to the return of Voldemort? No, this was Hermione’s problem.
You’re not worth the help, anyhow, a voice in her head broke through the thoughts. All you do is make the wrong choices. How can you win a war, when two muggles can bring you to your knees? She sniffled, scooting into the corner at the head of the bed that blocked her from view of the door.
The darkness pressed in on all sides, both suffocating and safe in obscurial. Hermione’s eyes tracked silver down her cheeks, fat drops plonking onto the smooth wooden floorboards. Drip, drip, drip drip, drip–
Crack!
Hermione’s head shot up, a hand finding purchase on the floor to balance her shaking frame. At the foot of her bed, in the inky murk of her dusky bedroom, a black-cloaked figure loomed, hood nearly brushing the low ceiling. Hermione’s blood streaked cold through her veins as her eyes found the silver gleam peering from beneath the hood. Before her brain could catch up to her petrified body, the intruder’s silver mask whipped to the room’s door.
Beneath the deafening drum of her heart, Hermione made out the distinct snick of a house key sliding into the lock downstairs.