The End Is The Beginning Is The End

‘Do you understand where you are?’

Hermione moaned.

‘That isn’t what I asked you.  Do.You.Understand.Where.You.Are?’

She knew that there would be more pain, but for the life of her she could not form the words.

Hestia Carrow seemed to have spent days, weeks, hell perhaps it was only hours, torturing her.

She graduated from the stones fairly quickly, moving from various forms of classical torture---water, electric schlock.  After Hermione passed out she seemed to grant her only a short reprieve.

She was barely conscious of what was happening to her, feeling as if she were on the outside watching all of this happen to another girl.  She felt drunk.  And pain.

The pain that never seemed to end.

The other girl’s face was oddly blank, but her eyes seemed twisted, and sometimes she grew short of breath.  Hermione knew she was enjoying this.

‘I was afraid that it wouldn’t reach this point…’

Hestia looked positively radiant as she opened up the cell door and in entered a young man.  He held a jar of honey.

She smiled, ‘Now comes the—

‘Care to explain the meaning of this?’

Hestia froze, and in her dazed mind, even Hermione was able to recognize the girl’s palpable fear.

Her entire face fell, and she looked nervous.

‘L-Lord Malfoy, I did not expect you for another m-month---‘

Hermione could not hear the conversation, and she felt her eyes drift shut.

She was tired.

Lucius carefully moved aside, waiting with a patience that seemed so forced that she felt that at any moment he was going to break her neck.

And knowing Lucius…

She gulped.  That would be a blessing.

‘I received a new mudblood, and was just—‘

‘Ah.’

He closed the door, and then slowly walked around the nervous girl, his boots making soft clicks on the stone floor.

‘Just a new mudblood?’

She smiled nervously,’Y-yessss’

He smiled.

A slow, pretty smile that made his entire face positively angelic.

The effect was completely ruined when he grabbed her head and slammed it into the wall.

The young man with her stumbled back in shock.

Lucius’s face was cold and inexpressive as he repeatedly began to bash the young witch’s head into the wall.

By the time he finished, the twin—what was her name?  Did it matter?—

He released the girl, flinging her away into the arms of the twin.

‘The bone is exposed,’ he detachedly said, observing the white part of her skull now visible.  The other twin was screaming and sobbing, shaking her sister.

He shrugged.  It was the girls fault. 

He looked at the boy, and said sharply, ‘Get them out of here.  Immediately.’

He held his head.  The sound of screaming gave him the worse kind of headache, and he could hear his temples throbbing.

When it was silent, he took a steadying breath.  And then he entered the room.

Hermione Granger.  Age…she had to be nineteen or twenty at this point…yet she still had the waifish figure of a young girl. 

He almost laughed.  She was unconscious, but that did not matter she was alive.  And as long as she was alive, the closer he came to victory…

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