Chapter 1
The southern hallway of the Order’s last safe-house, also the former home of the esteemed Prewitt family, yawned in the darkness before Hermione. She fiddled absently with a loose thread at the hem of her jumper, plucking at it as she followed a limping, angry Percy Weasley and a tense Minerva McGonagall. Percy’s limp was new, sustained in the newest mission the Order had returned from. His cane tapped heavily against the floor in time with his stride. She wanted to tell him to stop and return to the medi-wing for his sister to look him over, but she knew he would not stop his march forward.
They moved past the ancient, carved doors that lined the dusty walls, which felt out of place given the rest of the architecture of the building. Though this was not the first time she had been in this part of the Prewitt house, it still felt as foreign as the day she had first set foot here. She had grown to hate these abandoned rooms with their enchantment-heavy doors and whispers of past inhabitants. There could only be one reason she was called here tonight; her particular brand of magic was required.
In the dim light that filtered in from the iron wrought windows, the carvings that were inlaid upon the doors crawled, seeming to curl in on themselves. Hermione had learned that the Prewitts had held a particular affinity for architectural enchantments, ones that far exceeded the other wizarding homes she had seen. Upon first seeing it, she wondered if her eyes played tricks on her as the vines carved upon the doors writhed–but after discovering other parts of the house, where artistry often outweighed utility, she had disabused herself of the notion. Not for the first time, Hermione wondered at the enchantments of the doors and how intricately the artist must have honed them. They made for an eerie background that neither of her companions seemed to pay mind to. With the chill in the air that threatened to creep ever further into her bones, she couldn't help but feel she was being marched into the opening of a bad Muggle horror film.
No portraits hung on the walls, which Hermione still found odd for an old, pure-blood home such as this. The few–three, by her count–homes that she had seen had boasted living portraits of every generation within the last few centuries, at least. She reached out as their haggard trio passed a particularly long, unbroken stretch of striped wall, dragging her fingers against the dust that had settled in the empty space left behind.
Hermione turned away from the aging wallpaper and looked towards Percy. Though he had paused, glancing over his shoulder at her, he said nothing. Once she had caught up, he continued his awkward gait forward. She could nearly feel the pain rolling off his body, but bit her tongue. Nothing had changed in the last five minutes to make him head to the medi-wing. She supposed it must be painful for the Weasley family to live in their mother’s childhood home, and to be surrounded by reminders of happier days–Mrs. Weasley was the one who had removed the portraits, storing them somewhere in one of the empty bedrooms.
With a slight jolt, Hermione corrected herself. Had.
Her shoulders sagged. The reminder of Molly’s disappearance was a stark one. She was just the latest Order member to go missing, bringing their already dismal number down to a few dozen. If they didn’t figure something out soon, there would quickly be another. She remembered a time when Order safe-houses had spanned the country, and the numbers of the resistance were in the triple digits.
At this rate, there would be no one left.
Hermione privately doubted that their missing members were just missing –but seeing as the Order had yet to see or recover any bodies, the popular decision had been to refuse to confirm any of their missing were dead. It was not in the style of the Death Eaters to cover up deaths–not when the gore could be paraded, dropped at a mother’s doorstep, or broadcast for all the wizarding world to see.
Harry had been the first to suggest it–after all, he had been the first to see the pattern. If the missing were truly gone, the manner of their deaths would have been flaunted.
Percy halted ahead of her. Knocked out of her musing, she pulled up short before she crashed into his back. Having been so caught up in her thoughts, she realized she had miscounted the steps to the double doors at the end of the hall. McGonagall’s hand rested on the curved brass handle.
Hermione’s eyes narrowed. The former Transfiguration professor’s hands were shaking. Her gaze flicked up, and found Percy’s furious eyes settled upon her. The anger wasn’t directed at her, but she felt uneasy all the same. She glanced back the way they had come. In true horror film fashion, she couldn’t make out much in the yawning dark.
“Don’t tell me there’s another three-headed dog in that parlor,” she remarked, tamping down her discomfort. Her eyes ticked to McGonagall, who had yet to face her. Hermione had been here often enough to know that what waited behind this door meant a night of looming horrors.
Percy offered a wry smile, though the expression did not reach his eyes. He averted his gaze, becoming interested in the pattern of the wood beneath their feet. He leaned heavily on his cane, the handle sloppily carved to resemble a roaring lion. The cane was his father’s–the carving was Fred’s touch, completed when Mr. Weasley’s accident had occurred in sixth year.
“No,” McGonagall said at last. Her hand slipped from the door handle. Her eyes, which seemed sunken into her face and were underlined with heavy shadows, remained trained on the floor. “Though I suppose once you see him, you’ll wish that he was.”
Hermione crossed her arms, concealing the shake that had taken over her own hands, and steeled herself. There was no use pretending that she couldn’t do what they had called her here to do. It was a curse, being so talented at prying into the skulls of others–to know with a brush of her mind what others thought, to be able to intricately dissect their memories and find their deepest secrets.
Legilimens , they called her, with no small degree of trepidation, and a natural talent, at that.
Hermione began the compartmentalization that she had learned was required to retain her sanity. She had learned early on in her time with the Order that her feelings about her ability, whether positive or negative, were best left shoved in a tight box in the back of her mind to be handled very rarely and only in the latest hours of the evening when everyone else had vanished to their sleeping quarters. She knew how the others looked at her–or rather, avoided it. At times, she regretted having ever revealed her abilities.
After all, it had led to her assignments within the Order.
She often told herself they were not wrong for wanting to use her talent. She couldn’t deny that; she was an asset in a war where their enemies held equal and worse talents. How could she refuse what the Order asked of her, with so many lives on the lines?
The toe of Hermione’s shoe drew a line into the dusty floor. “Who is it?” she asked, her emotion shuttering into its box.
Percy scowled. “Inner circle. He won’t talk. Hermione, I know–” He cut himself off, his jaw working. “He’s strong. He has a resistance to veritaserum. Moody couldn’t extract anything.”
The mention of the disliked older auror made Hermione’s stomach turn in distaste, but of the three wizards who handled her debriefs, she preferred the grouchy wizard to the two who stood before her. Percy was unpredictable in his emotions; McGonagall treated her with kid-gloves. Moody saw her for what she was and treated her with the acknowledgement of an equal–even if their methods were different.
She inclined her head toward the double doors, her gaze settling upon the etchings of wings belonging to falcons, their feathers out stretching and contracting in an indiscernible pattern to her eyes.
“Is he why Fred is..?”
The vein on Percy’s forehead bulged. “Fighting for his life in the medi-wing? Yeah. The fucker caught him right in the throat.”
Hermione nodded. The chatter had been so loud when his mission had returned that she could almost feel the buzz against her skull. Upon coming into the entryway, she had nearly slid in the blood that was spilling across the floor. Fred and Percy had collapsed in a bloody pile on the cracked marble tiles, Percy's hands clasped to his brother's throat as he shouted for someone to help them while Fred's throat made a sickening gurgle. Percy's own leg had been twisted horribly behind him, sticking at an angle that made Hermione nauseous to remember. His mind– and thus, his anger and pain–had been raging loudly against hers, even when she thought she had kept her magic carefully contained. She had felt helpless, standing there with her back pressed against the wall as Ginny, determined to help wherever she could, battlefield or otherwise, swept into the scene, her face blanched as she barked orders at the scurrying people.
Three hours after the youngest Weasley had helped drag her brother into the infirmary, Percy and McGonagall had summoned her to this abandoned corner of the house, devoid of life and filtered with a haze of dust.
Hermione knew why Percy was here, planning to wait for her to tear into their prisoner's mind, instead of at his brother's side. The deep-set exhaustion that permanently dragged at his face had begun to pepper his red hair with grey despite his youth, and tonight, there was a simmering rage lurking in his eyes that she had never seen before, but recognized as plainly as if it were her own.
If he witnessed another of his brothers die, he would crumble.
She let her arms fall to her sides, resigned. She couldn’t say no–she wouldn’t, not when the information she would recover would be vital to the Order. She would do as she had always done–the same, carefully restrained approach, followed by a night of drowning her pain in whatever way she could.
“What do you need?” she asked, then paused, searching for a better way to phrase her query. They needed for her to torture someone. “What are you looking for?”
Percy’s lips curled into a sneer as he looked back to the door. “The names of those closest to him. The location of their Lord, their safe-houses. The fucking Horcruxes. He’s inner circle–he has the mark. He has to know something.”
It was no secret that legilimency was painful–for the caster and the target, alike. Percy knew the risk that came with her brand of interrogation. He was hoping for pain, for some form of revenge for Fred’s injuries.
She had never told them how greatly legilimency affected her. They did not know of the long hours spent clutching one of the toilets, the restless sleep interrupted by cold sweat, or the near-constant churning of her stomach, let alone the fragments of the memories through which she had torn and been unable to shake. How many weeks had she spent hoping someone would notice? Dozens? Hundreds?
McGonagall’s eyes were glistening, she noticed. Percy’s motive was clear. The former Transfiguration professor’s… Hermione supposed she was here out of a sense of duty. Not for the first time, and not, she suspected, for the last, the young witch said quietly, “I hate this, you know.”
The older woman’s eyes slipped shut. “I know.”
Hermione squared her shoulders and stepped forward, hand settling against the cool brass door handle. It turned beneath her hand, and she pushed it inward to step into the parlor. Goosebumps rose along her arms as she entered it.
The furniture within it had been shoved haphazardly to the sides of the room, several pieces lying in broken heaps in the cobwebbed corners. In the center of the room, chained to a wrought-iron chair, was a lean man, his face obscured by a burlap sack. Blood soaked the front ruffles of his once-white dress shirt, now discolored with a myriad of brown and rust stains. The rips in his pants displayed cuts and bruises which revealed his participation in the raid that had severely injured Fred. Her eyes fell to his hands, which were curling against the armrests. With a jolt, she realized several of his nails had been torn from their nail beds, leaving distorted, bleeding flesh behind. Droplets of blood fell from his fingertips, dripping slowly down the metal arms of the chair. In the chill of the abandoned parlor, he was shivering.
A stool had been left before him.
“Really?” she asked as she paced towards the wooden seat. The man’s body stiffened at the sound of her voice. “The sack over his head is a bit much. And his hands…” Moody’s handiwork. It wasn’t palatable.
She knew hers would be no better.
“The less he sees of the townhouse, the better,” Percy muttered, shuffling towards the mess of furniture and finding a short ottoman. He righted it and sank down onto the ripped cushions, stuffing spilling out of them. He released a groan, gesturing with the end of his cane. “Like we said, he’s strong. He hasn’t talked yet. Will that be a problem?”
Her lips began to pull down in a scowl, which she quickly checked. Percy’s tone had veered into the tone he used as a handler. The small seed of resentment that was always burrowed in her chest grew.
“It will certainly take longer,” she said stiffly.
Though Percy replied, she did not pay attention to what he said as she adjusted the stool before their prisoner and sat down. She eyed his legs warily. He had a stronger build up close, and if his legs hadn’t been secured to the posts of his chair, she worried he would plant his food in the center of her chest and send her flying back.
Hermione drew in a slow breath. A few hours of pain, and she could return to the research she was doing on those damn Horcruxes. Two were left. If she was lucky, the man before her had information on them.
She relaxed, calm settling over her. The man jerked at his chains, the muscles in his forearms throbbing with the effort. His chest heaved, the fabric shifting and revealed purpling skin across his abdomen.
There was no point in delaying the process of delving into his mind any further. It was needlessly cruel.
Hermione reached up, her hands coming to rest on either side of the man's face beneath the burlap. He flinched, but was unable to move out of her reach. She let her eyes slip closed, letting her mind relax. The tendrils of her consciousness pressed forward, testing the confines of his mind.
Curiosity swept through her at what she found.
Most, if not all of the minds she had picked through were wide open, but muddled. It often felt like sifting through fog, though she had become near-expert at finding what she needed. A few, who had obtained some training in guarding their minds, erected shoddy walls and buildings designed to blockade her.
Those often didn’t last.
But the sight before her…
This man’s mind was not wide open, hidden by murk and pinpointed with light spots of memory. His was crafted of high, marble walls, yawning out into the recesses of his mind as far as she could sense. The beauty of it nearly knocked her breath away. The expanse of the wall seemed without end, and her lips parted as she turned her focus to either side, searching for cracks, vulnerabilities, or doors, but there were none. A pinpoint of pain grew within the center of her forehead, growing stronger as the seconds ticked by.
She eased back, studying the dabbled stone surface and searching for any give to the structure. There was no way in, except–there, a give in the stone that revealed a door. Her eyes narrowed. She swore that hadn’t been there a second ago.
Cautiously, she moved forward, lingering at the threshold of the wall without crossing it. As Hermione peered further in, his mind-space revealed a long corridor with a sharp turn at the end. As she watched, doorways and corners wavered into existence before vanishing back into the marble.
An ever-changing maze.
Of all the minds she had ventured into, none had been as beautifully--terribly--made as this. A tendril of shame weighted at the back of her neck, knowing she had been tasked to destroy it.
The longer she lingered, the more the maze seemed to change. The constant change of doorways seemed to slow, made languid by her presence. There was a glimmer of light that she glimpsed within one of the temporary doorways. As she focused her mind towards it, the pain spread to envelope her entire skull. What she did encounter was a vicious hatred, tempered with the sour whisper of fear. The surprise of the secondary feeling filled her mouth with its sour taste, and she sat back, her hands falling away.
The pain growing in her head vanished.
With a sinking feeling, she connected the dots of who was sitting before her. Occlumens were rare, their styles of defense as widely varied as the witch or wizard that possessed them. In her limited reading she had been able to accomplish on the subject- books about them seemed to be almost as rare as the Occlumens themselves- their approach towards magic was the determining factor in the structure of their defenses.
One within Voldemort's ranks…
This would be a long, excruciating night.
She dreaded it.
She knew she deserved it.
“I need to see his eyes,” Hermione announced. Before either Percy or McGonagall could protest, she reached back and yanked the sack off the man's head.
The beaten, bruised face of Draco Malfoy glared back at her. In the years since Hogwarts, he seemed to have grown into the angular structure of his features- which were now bloody and bruised. One eye was swollen shut. His face had been stricken in such a manner that she would not have recognized him without the platinum blond hair that hung in a mess about his face and his visible, furious grey eye. His lip curled as he looked back at her, and he spoke.
Her stomach twisted.
This was the boy who had spent seven years hating her in school, and now, seven more after graduation, the man who was actively working on the orders of a wizard who wanted nothing more than to see the subservience and extermination of muggles and muggle-born.
The other minds she had been in were… apart from her. She had never met them before she tore into their minds. She knew of their names, had read their dossiers, knew their crimes. The detachment made her task easier to perform.
But this was different. She knew him.
“You are the infamous Legilimens of the Order?” Malfoy spat, fresh blood seeping from his split lip. “I should have fucking guessed.”