Haunted

1 | spider's web

"Wow, you managed to score Potter's Mudblood?"

"She put up a fight. But we got her."

Hermione's eyes fluttered open to the sound of voices echoing around her, barely audible. Her fight or flight instinct kicked in, but as her head swiveled in both directions, finding only rough stone walls and steel bars, it became clear that there was nobody to fight and nowhere to flee. Wherever she was, she was trapped. There was a ringing in her ears and a dull ache swimming through her head, but she was unable to conjure a reason why. She dove back through her memory, trying to uncover what had happened, but nothing surfaced. It was all just... blank.

A woman she didn't recognize stepped into view, just beyond the bars of her cell. "What's your name?" the woman asked, looking down at Hermione with faint delight. That look told her all that she needed to know; she'd been captured by Death Eaters.

She blinked. "Penelope Clearwater," she lied immediately, the familiar pseudonym rolling easily off her tongue. Dimly, she wondered what Penelope was doing these days. Had she survived the Battle of Hogwarts? What had come of her?

The woman's face drew tightly together, and then released as she rolled her eyes, a thin smile settling on her lips. "Nice try," she said, and Hermione's heart leapt. There were two options. Either they knew Penelope Clearwater and thus knew that Hermione was not her, or they knew who Hermione was already.

She found the latter to be more likely, if only because she was mostly known to the Death Eaters as Harry Potter's friend. Harry... His unmoving green eyes flashed before her mind, but she pushed the thought away. In the time since he'd died, she'd found grief to be a convenient excuse to slip into her own head and drown out the rest of the world. But she couldn't do that now. She had to focus.

Her eyes sharpened on the woman, scanning for anything that she could use. But there was nothing. The woman was seemingly a blank slate. She donned a black cloak that shrouded her figure and she stared at Hermione with deep brown eyes, her blonde hair pulled into a ponytail that sat atop her head. There wasn't an ounce of familiarity to her tanned face.

The woman pulled her gaze away from Hermione and looked back over her shoulder. "Malfoy," she called, "this one needs another go."

Malfoy?

Sure enough, a white-blond head appeared out of the darkness, and a chill ran down her spine as his silver eyes locked on her face. Her reaction was instinctive. She scrambled to her feet and swung her body against the bars of the cell, a clang reverberating through the cavern. "You!" she shrieked in a blind rage. "You fucker!"

He didn't so much as flinch. Just appraised her outburst the way an adult would watch a child throwing a tantrum in a grocery store. He stood perfectly still, his arms clasped behind his back. Raising an eyebrow, he stepped forward another inch, perhaps expecting her to shrink back. But she stood her ground. "Yes?"

That same mocking tone from school grated on her nerves. Jaw jutted forward and nostrils flared, she summoned her most menacing glare and fixed it on him. "I could kill you," she hissed. She could hear her heartbeat thumping in her throat. In the near silence of the cavern, could he hear it? "You vile coward. Cruel, pathetic monster. Spineless, weak—"

His face changed suddenly, the amusement replaced by a blank stare. He was Occluding, shielding his true emotions. Typical. "That's enough."

Not for her, it wasn't. "You are a hateful, disgusting creature," she continued, tightening her grip on the bars of the cell as she glowered. "You had every fucking chance in the world to do the right thing, and you never took it."