Sweet Sacrifice

Chapter 7 Numb

Hermione's PoV

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I don't know how many days have passed; but after losing count, it seems like eternity has come and gone. Voldemort has shut me up in an old, musty room, and sometimes I wonder if he has forgotten me in here. The nights slowly creep by, and right now, it is well past midnight. On this night, I have not fallen asleep, instead, I find myself thinking about how insane he really is. His temper went through the ceiling because not only did I make the mistake of telling him I was starting to have feelings for him, but somewhere I drew up the courage to slap him.

Curling up with a pillow in this dank, dusty room, my stomach feels as if it is riding a wave in a sea of nausea. I have been feeling like this for days on end. Every day I wake up to my stomach feeling queasy, throwing up in the furthest closet of this room so I won't have to look at it or smell it. I know there is something wrong with me...

When I can think clearly and am not engulfed in my nausea, I question myself about why I even started having feelings for him in the first place. How can I actually like someone who rapes and murders women for his own sick pleasure? Confusion doesn't begin to cover my emotions. It feels like I am torn up inside - being ripped into many different pieces, each one gnawing angrily at my already torn insides. I press my eyes closed with my hands, seeing tiny lights dance back and forth on my inner eyelids. As I open them, I can see his face in the darkness ahead. My heart is now beating faster. Tears begin spilling from my eyes; I feel

as though I am trapped inside my tormented state and left to rot here. Tom Riddle... Voldemort... is literally the devil incarnate. Why did I let my guard down during those nights I told him those stories? No matter what I do, I cannot push these thoughts from my head; I refuse to. My emotions have betrayed me; there is no sensible or logical explanation for my feelings toward him. Yes, he is good looking, but there is so much more to a person than just looks alone.... And when I think of how much I truly love my boyfriend Ron, I feel my heart break all over again as though I were unfaithful to him by having these insignificant feelings for the Dark Lord. Maybe I feel this way because he is the only man I have been in contact with for half a year. But whatever has driven me to this startling realization, the only thing that makes me feel slightly better about it is knowing that I actually slapped the Dark Lord... right before he hit me back.

~*~

The bright sunlight tells me it is early morning. I awake to find him sitting at the edge of my bed. The sight of him startles me, as he is not the first thing I want to see when I open my eyes. He stares down at me rather condescendingly, ordering me to tell him a new story. I refuse, but the same events unfold with each passing morning: He comes in and demands a story from me, as though he has forgotten about our fight from so many nights ago. Each time he asks, I refuse, mentally waiting for him to kill me for my constant refusal of his demands. Instead, he leaves the room, locking it again behind him.

Being trapped in this room for so long has dampened my spirits to the point where I no longer feel the joy of happiness, only the stinging pain of depression as I continually stare out on my bleak surroundings. My time spent in here, locked away like a criminal, has given me a sense of claustrophobia as with each passing minute, hour, and day, I feel as though he has left me to die in this very room. Perhaps he is trying to break me down mentally... he seems to be doing a very good job at it.

It is many mornings later that he places the front section of The Daily Prophet on my bed, right where he knows I can see it. From my spot, I can read clearly the part of the paper he has folded back for me:

Brave Order Member Killed in Surprise Attack

"Look," he says, the excitement evident in his voice. He points to the first paragraph, where listed is the name of the recently murdered: Ronald Weasley. My heart stops beating, and my breath catches in my throat.

"Because you have not been telling me stories, I was forced to have your boyfriend killed. You have left me no choice; I wanted your head clear of him."

I can only see his blurred figure through my eyes; the tears are pouring out faster then I can wipe them off. My heart painfully beats in my chest as I slowly begin to realize that I will never see Ron again. While I'm crying my eyes out, Voldemort leaves the room without so much as another word. He leaves the paper in my room as a painful reminder of my supposed betrayal of him. Everywhere I look, my eyes fall upon that paper and its haunting words. I read and reread it again until the words have simply lost all meaning in my numb brain: Ronald is dead.

Laying my head on my tear-soaked pillow, morning slowly shifts into afternoon, shifting into night. I don't think the tears have stopped falling yet. Sometime during the night I fall asleep with my face still very much wet with tears.

Thankfully, the following morning is unusually quiet. As I awake, the first few moments of consciousness are sweet as I temporarily forget the pain and anguish over losing Ron. But when the fog clears from my brain, the remembrance of his death fills my head once more. What has promised to be a beautiful day turns to ashes in the matter of a few painful seconds.

~*~

A week - I am sure - has passed now and still, not a moment has gone by where Tom has gone back to waking me up and demanding another story from me. Honestly, my heart just isn't in them anymore. I wish he would just kill me and be done with it so I can see my beloved Ron again. But no, he is keeping me alive so I can live with this pain. He enjoys the horror I am subjected to by showing me the obituaries of the next person he just had killed... all in my name. Today, he shows me a most heart-wrenching story in The Daily Prophet: Remus and his new wife, Nymphadora, were killed on their wedding night. The person responsible

for this atrocity? He is standing in this very room with me, a sick smile plastered over his face.

"So easy to tamper with, love is," he says with a bemused air, leaving the paper where I can see it. "You should have heard her beg me not to kill her husband. And he was just as insistent that I didn't kill his wife. But wherever they are now, they're together again. Isn't that how all stories end? With a supposed 'happy ending'?"

He looks at me with his thin mouth now curving into an even more visible smirk. "Just so you know, I had to do it," he mumbles as he begins to head out the door. "You'll understand."

Somehow, I do not think I will ever understand the way in which his brain works or his own twisted views of what a happy ending is truly about.