Harry Potter: The Price of Silence.

22nd December

Throughout her incarceration at Malfoy Manor, Hermione came to realise that time was a cruel, selfish little mistress.

Time was uncaring. Unsympathetic. She didn't care that with each tick of her clock, Hermione felt her tenacious Gryffindor spirit slipping away, felt the fire in her belly and that burning courage extinguishing with each rising sun. That each day, when Malfoy sharply assaulted Hermione with his particularly cruel brand of Legilimens magic, a small part of herself chipped away. Or that he was tearing away at her, shredding her psyche apart as he tore through her mind. Time didn't care that she felt herself starting to weaken, splintering, piece by painful piece.

No, of course not. Time didn't care about trivial things like that. She didn't care about the war or the millions of lives that had been lost during her rotations. She didn't care if Voldemort won or if he stamped out what was left of The Order and the world was eclipsed by his darkness. The only thing time was concerned with was ensuring the moon set each evening, and that Helios pulled the sun to rise each morning with his golden chariot.

Time's goals were simple, unambitious; to bring the promise of a new day. The hope of a fresh start, a clean slate.

Even if some people didn't want another day. Even if hope was a luxury that some people simply couldn't afford anymore.

The days dragged on and on. Hermione repeated the same boring, mundane routine with each rise of the sun.

Her mornings started with Malfoy bursting her bedroom door open - the sound of the wood hitting the wall violently always jolted her out of what dreamlike state she'd been plotting in.

He would offer her the anti-magic potion.

She would refuse it with a sharp; "fuck you," or "Go to hell."

Malfoy would command her to drink it, more forcefully the second time.

Hermione would either smack his outstretched hand away or spit in his face; whichever seemed the more appealing at the time; whichever she felt would turn Malfoy's stomach the most. More often than not, she chose to spit.

He would react in one of two ways; either paralyze her with a hex and pour the liquid into her throat, or pin her against a surface, pry her mouth open and force it down like he had done on that first day. Like Hermione, he often chose the more volatile of the two options. The sick bastard probably got off overpowering her like that.

Afterwards, he would instruct a house-elf to wait with her while the potion took effect, and he would disappear. The elves would talk to Hermione while they waited for him to return, trying to defuse the awful strain in the atmosphere. The elf would chat quite casually to her while she threw a fit, ignoring her as she overturned all the furniture in her room and punched the walls in a fit of rage.

And when Malfoy eventually reappeared, he would barge into her mind. His magic would bludgeon into her skull like a sledgehammer, and then the image of him would appear in her mind right alongside her.

Their routine within her mind was just as repetitive. They'd stand side by side and stare at the fortress she'd made to keep him from her memories, he would make a snide comment - usually about her appearance or lack of creativity in her design - then he would charge forward and try to break down the doors.

It took him four days to get them open.

He'd smiled smugly at her from over his shoulder when he'd done it; his eyes burning triumphantly as he entered the hotel and Hermione had followed closely behind. His smile had vanished when they'd entered a long, stretched out hallway, lined with dozens upon dozens of different coloured wooden doors, all as reinforced as the one into the hotel.

Hermione had organised her mind thoroughly during her training in memory blocking. She'd spent her isolated evenings honing her craft, filing each memory away behind walls and doors and locking the most important memories away, as far from his reach as she could manage. She intended to make this as difficult for him as possible. If he thought she would give up her secrets easily, he was very fucking mistaken.

Her maddeningly thought-out filling system, coupled with the will of her psyche and years of training had the desired effect. When he'd failed to force that door to her first real, tangible memory open by the end of the sixth day, Malfoy started to become volatile.

He was growing more frustrated by the day. His failed attempts to uncover even the smallest of her memories scratched at his confidence, and the more she wounded his pride, the more unhinged he became. And the more dangerous. He'd started searching her mind more sporadically after the first week. At random intervals, multiple times a day. Each session was more painful than the last, but Hermione held strong. She could do this. He'd crack before she did, she'd make sure of it.

After Malfoy pulled out of her mind, Hermione woke on the floor screaming, gasping and panting for breath. In many ways, the aftermath hurt more than the initial intrusion.

Legilimency was an exceptionally invasive type of magic. Intimate but unwelcome. It was punishing, overly taxing on the subject's body, and certainly not meant for continuous, everyday exposure. Malfoy's relentless use of the spell would have certainly caused concerns if the Ministry of Magic was still around. Probably would have earned him a good decade in Azkaban, but the Ministry wasn't there anymore. He wouldn't be carted away to rot in a cell for his inhumane actions. He wouldn't sit in the corner of a mouldy cage, paranoid, mind melting away as he waited for the kiss from a dementor.

No one was going to stop him. No one was coming to help her, so the torture continued. It gave Hermione something to fantasize about though. Gave her something pleasant to focus on while she lay bored in her pretty little cell.

By the fourth day of her imprisonment, Hermione had begun bleeding out of her eyes after their sessions. The first time she'd barely noticed it, too busy writhing on the floor, her vision blurred and temples throbbing. She'd been in too much pain to register the wetness streaking from her eyes -

Until it had started to pool on the floor beneath her.

On the fifth day, she'd started to bleed from the corners of her mouth after their sessions and by the seventh day, it started to streak from her ears too. The harder she fought against the spell, the more she bled, and the more the pressure in her temples deepened to the point she wondered if her skull might fracture from it.