Nox

"Anaesthetise these troubled nerves
Over to you to make it work Agents of change set headfires
I'd rather starve than fake alive
Lost to the cities of the night
Lost in the world of make it right. . ."


—Bush, "Hurricane"

Chapter Three - Aveda Kedavra

"Oh, hello, Hermione," came a disembodied voice, echoing in the dungeons. Hermione had been on her way to ask Professor Snape a question about the last Potions assignment of the year, which even she was finding nearly impossible. She stopped and turned towards the source of the voice. It was female, and she had a feeling she should have recognized it.

Curious as she always was, Hermione began to walk along an adjacent corridor she'd passed many times but never ventured down. She walked past an open door, not noticing it until the same dreamlike voice called out to her again, this time sounding more human and less like a phantom. In the doorway stood Katie Bell, in all her five foot, strawberry-blonde, rosy-cheeked glory, polishing the blade of what appeared to Hermione to be one hell of a knife with a white cloth. "What're you doing down in the bowels of the school this late, Granger?" she asked. She was the Gryffindor Quidditch coach, dividing her time between playing for the Tutshill Tornadoes and coaching the Gryffindor team. Everyone thought she was sleeping with Bill Weasley, the new Arithmancy Professor, and she probably was, come to think about it. He was Ginny's older brother, so perhaps Ginny had found out about their sexcapades and came to inquire about it, only to be killed. This was only one of the dozens of theories Hermione dreamed up of the years following her exile without trial.

Katie smiled and beckoned Hermione inside, saying she needed to ask something about Harry's behaviour lately, because he wasn't putting forth a hundred and ten percent effort on the team, like he used to. Hermione shrugged and walked in the room ahead of the faerie-like Katie.

Before she knew what hit her, Katie had launched herself onto Hermione's back and Hermione only felt the cold steel of the knife for a nanosecond before she felt it slice her flesh like mere butter. She figured she'd be dead a few seconds with her throat slashed, but the managed to buck Katie off and she put her hand to the gash. It wasn't until Katie swore at seeing Hermione still standing that Hermione realized the right side of her throat was cut instead of the left where the major artery was. Katie had missed murdering her.

Katie picked herself up from the flagstone floor where she'd landed after being thrown off Hermione's back. Hermione got her wand out, but she knew she'd be toast if it was knocked away from her. Hermione stepped backwards as Katie squared her shoulders and flipped her long, straight strawberry hair over her shoulder, her lips pursed in disgusted annoyance, her eyes darting from Hermione to a point just beyond her on the floor.

Hermione's foot hit something, and she turned and looked down, to find a body with long red hair. She screamed, and just then Katie launched herself at her, grabbing her around the waist and knocking her back, skidding several yards across the stones. Hermione had Katie firmly by the wrist she held the knife with, and managed to get it wrenched away from her, tossing it towards the far wall of the dungeon. It hit the wall with a dull clang and spun on an odd axis before fading to a still to look bent and sad. Katie pulled up off of Hermione and pulled out her wand, turning it towards her own chest and giving Hermione a vicious smirk more befitting of a Slytherin than a sprightly former Gryffindor. Hermione scrambled to her feet, her breath ragged.

Katie's smile widened, and her last words were whispered so softly that Hermione couldn't tell that the first syllable was corrupted. "Aveda Kedavra."

Hermione tried to scream but found no sound would come. Her throat had plugged up. Her eyes were fixed unwaveringly on the scene before her. Katie Bell slumped over, seemingly dead before she hit the ground, her wand clattering with her, rolling across the floor to Hermione's feet.

Hermione picked it up and ran towards Ginny, one of the only girls she'd ever been remotely close to and checked for a pulse. She ignored the blood oozing out of the angry gash across her own throat from Katie's knife. She was lucky; but her own injury didn't matter— Katie's body didn't matter. Only Ginny and Ginny being dead mattered.

She cried over Ginny as she lay lifeless, her sobs never quite escaping her lips in an audible way, always seeming to get choked up just before they reached her larynx. It must have been an hour before any sound at all reached Hermione's hypersensitive ears. It was a choked gasp, masculine, from the doorway. She looked up, wiping tears from her eyes to see Harry and Ron there. Harry's face turned from normal to white to grey to very dark, and every colour in between, including blue and green, before finally settling in a sallow, yellowish darkness of unexpressed anguish. He just stared, his lips parting and the corners of his eyes crinkling, but not into a smile. Ron was obviously struggling to breathe. He gasped at uneven intervals and his eyes looked dead and fish-like. Hermione couldn't find her voice to say anything. Surely they would see the place across her throat where she'd been cut; surely they would perform Priori Incantatem on she and Katie's wands and see who had cast the killing curse on the Weasley girl.

But they didn't.

Finally, Harry came forward and yelled, "Expelliarmus!" Katie's wand flew out of Hermione's hand. Harry caught it then tossed it to Ron. Hermione rose to her feet, stunned at the sudden loss of her wand, but Harry was faster, and he rushed forward, keeping his own wand focused on her chest. She didn't even dare to breathe, her eyes locked on his wild emeralds. Even in the dim firelight, she could see the sudden madness in those eyes; that look would haunt her forever, even after he was gone and she was alone and cold.

"How could you?" he cried at her, grabbing her by the wrists and holding them behind her back so she couldn't even put up a struggle against him. "Why, Hermione?"

Hermione was too stunned to say anything. She couldn't get past the knowledge that they seemed to hold her accountable for the two deaths, obviously tossing out the fact they knew Hermione valued nothing more than life and freedom. Obviously seven years of friendship and being in Gryffindor had taught them nothing when it came to loyalty. She was too stunned to so much as breathe.

Ron came forward more slowly than Harry, and he knelt beside Katie, touching her pale white throat gingerly. His face didn't change as he rose again to his feet but his eyes took on the grim tint that the expected sadness has indeed come to pass. "She's got no pulse," he said softly, emotionlessly. "She's dead."

Hermione's eyes refused to spill the multitude of molten tears behind them, and Hermione's classic steely resolve prevented them from even welling up. She never once took them off Ron as he collected himself and knelt beside his little sister and touched two fingers to her throat. He squeezed his grey eyes closed after a moment and withdrew his hand, placing it on his knee tentatively, before covering his face with it. Shaking, he dropped back onto his buttocks, and crossed his legs Indian style, and covered his face with both hands. Hermione watched in her stunned silence as his broad, proud shoulders seemed to shrink into those of a little boy as he wept over the little sister he would never see laugh again.

He turned his face towards where Harry and Hermione stood and took one hand away. "She's dead, Hermione," he whimpered. "My little sister is dead! Why would you do this? She never did anything to you, Hermione, why would you hurt her?"

Hermione suddenly felt herself shoved down and away, where she landed hard on her knees. She felt the rough flagstone through the thin material of her robes and almost cried out. But her voice still wasn't working. If only she could tell them she didn't do it. Why did they not see the wound at her throat? Did they not see the blood oozing from it, soaking into the collar of her robes and shirt? Perhaps their grief blinded them to the physical as well as their friend. Their assumptions dug into Hermione like white hot porcupine quills, scarring her skin disfiguringly and maliciously. Perhaps when it heeled, the nerve endings would be dead and remote, and she'd be rendered unable to feel. Then again, she rationalized she'd receive the Dementor's Kiss for Katie's crimes, and would be too Blank to care if she was in pain or not. She stared forward at the grey of the stone, committing each sharpness and each difference in shading to memory forever.

She looked up to see Harry and Ron hugging in a most un-masculine way, but both were far too gone to care. And as she watched, Hermione truly felt a part of herself die, fluttering away after Ginny to the Otherworld, which was hopefully a better place than whatever this world was, like a plastic bag caught in the ruthless winds of change and torment.

*

Seven years later, Hermione, changed so much yet still the same person, sat up in the middle of the night and stared out the window at the pale, waning gibbous of a moon and remembered those times. She squeezed her eyes closed to shut out the brightness and keep in her tears. She pulled the crisp hotel sheets around herself and settled back into a ball on the floor, careful not to make enough noise to disturb the wizard on the bed, who was also staring sleeplessly at the moon, unbeknownst to her.

"I never meant to become what I was," she whispered, mostly to herself. "I never wanted to be that."

"I doubt any girl grows up dreaming of being a prostitute," he said. "Most of them dream of being actresses and singers and professional athletes. Pipe dreams, maybe."

Hermione was startled. She glanced up at the bed, but he was not sitting up, or even looking at her. She knew that even though the room was completely dark but for the piercing moonlight, which beamed down on an obscure place in the middle of the bed, seemingly refusing to illuminate either of them to the other.

"I wanted to be a teacher," she said slowly. "I even have two years in of college. Then my money ran out completely. I moved here, and I slept in a rat-infested tenement for another year before a woman named Cady handed me a black business card. That card ruined my life." She spoke in a voice without the faintest trace of bitterness, perhaps wistful over what could have been, but not regretful of what had occurred instead. "But I'm not going to dwell on the past. I've lost too much time already to waste anymore."

Draco rolled over on the bed to look over the edge at her, from an angle where she couldn't see his eyes, but could feel them on her as she lay under the blankets of her makeshift bed. She was sitting in an abstract foetal position, her feet and legs extended out a bit more than normal, and her arms resting on her knees, palms curled around elbows. He could see the scar across her throat and collar bones glowing a slight silver colour in the moonlight's reflection, since she was wearing only a black tank top over her pathetically bony frame. The skin was stretched taut over bones, dipping concave in the places where there was no muscle or skeleton to support it from underneath, such as the hollow of her chest just above her breasts, or the spots at the middles of her cheeks, and the place between her thumb and index finger, just below the index finger's joint. Even her eyes were the hollow brown of someone long dead inside an empty shell. She shivered, not knowing why.

"Hermione," he said, "what are you going to say to Katie when you see her again?" She turned her head towards the sound of his voice as it struck her. He saw her shoulders rise and fall with her chest with the effort of drawing breath. She tucked a renegade bit of hair behind her ear and sighed again.

"I don't imagine I'll say anything right off. Perhaps I'll just sit there and stare at her cold, brow furrowed," she replied. "I can't really say now because I don't have the faintest clue. What would you say to a person who got you convicted and thrown out of your own life for their death as well as the life of an innocent?" Her tone was bland, innocuous as a doe rabbit with no kittens, emotionless and tragic as a Hitler Youth's final battle cry before death at the gun of a man old enough to be his father.

That question caught Draco by surprise. She said it with such austerity and a lack of conviction, as though she were completely careless. She rose out of her bed and stood up to her full height. His eyes flicked up her body, pleasantly surprised it was not a tank top she wore, but a black bra, and matching panties. She walked over the chair where her purse was, and she took out a Newport and a lighter and lit up the cigarette.

In the cool, pearly greyness of the moonlight, she stood silhouetted against the heart wrenching light, her graceful frame slouched in it’s decrepit black lace glory, graceful as an egret, sad like the pieces of a broken icicle lying on the ground. She was so sensual, so terribly casual and sad. . .he could nearly feel her inside him over and over again, grinding in the marrow of his bones, grating him with her outrageous carelessness. She shook her hair out over her proud back and slim shoulders, the hardened lines of her delicate, beautiful face glowing softly in the pale luminescence of the time darkest before dawn.

He filled his eyes with the immortal, unforgettable picture before him, filled them with the black lines of her too-slim form, filled them with the ghostly clouds of smoke that encircled her like the mystery she had come to be. It was the careless, hopeless, tragic sensuality of her hands, her fingers, and the cigarette between them.

She reminded him of his mother in a way, and he tore his eyes away from her form at the window, to the boring framed print on the wall. But she was so irresistible, his eyes were drawn back to where she stood with one arm crossed over her stomach, fingers curling around her waist and the other arm bent up at the elbow to hold the cigarette just an inch from her lips. Her eyes were fixed unmoving on a point far below.

Draco finally admitted it to himself. There was something about Hermione Granger that sucked you in and made you want to care. She made him want to be a better person, if only for his sake. She clearly didn't give a damn about herself. He supposed whatever had all happened to her in the seven years of her exile, it had shattered the bookish girl he'd once known and rebuilt her steely and graceful as a fencing foil, but fragile as a champagne flute.

There were no thoughts in her mind as she blew a puff of smoke into the room. Her mind was quiet; her ills were at rest for the moment.

"I think I would stay silent," he said.

Though she did not look at him, a smile played at her lips. "Sometimes silence speaks in volumes mere words cannot convey." Those words reverberated in his mind as she stood with her cigarette.

"Why did you get in the car with me?" he asked.

Her shoulders raised and fell in a half-hearted attempt at a shrug. "Why do people do anything?" she asked. "I may have been a subconscious escape from the life I was leading. You were right when you said no one wants to be a whore. I've known a lot of girls, and I can't think of one who was truly happy in her situation. Our world isn't like that in Pretty Woman, and not every happy hooker gets her millionaire. In fact, I've watched more girls go to their deaths than to a happy life with the man in the drivers' seat."

Her cigarette burned out as she ran out of words, and she jammed it in the glass ashtray on the little black table near the window, before lighting up a second cigarette. Each movement she made had a cultivated seductress quality to it. She blew another plume of smoke up into the air, where it mingled with the light of the coming of dawn from the horizon, turning purple-white before dissipating.

"If you could go back and change things, would you?" he asked, never taking his eyes off the smoke against the breaking dawn.

She shook her head after a moment, the movement serpentine with the result of her cascade of dark hair to ripple over her pronounced shoulder blades. "The universe is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering," she said wisely. "I think things might have turned out worse than they did if I went back and did something different. I don't have time to be greedy."

As he watched her, she almost reminded him of a crumpled white paper bag, trapped in the wind.