I hope our story has a happier ending

my muffled cries

There's not time for escape.

With them the Death Eaters bring an anti-apparition charm, cast the second they appear, and they know someone there said Voldemort.

(There's no hope of the trio getting away.)

Panicking and trying to strategize more quickly than ever before, Hermione reaches for the Peruvian Darkness Power in her pocket, and in the cover of the muffliato she'd cast twenty minutes prior orders, "Don't make a sound. Neither of you can occlude—it's not safe for Lyra if you're captured."

Harry opens his mouth to argue, but Ron clamps a hand over it.

She shakes her head at Harry. "You have to let them take me. If you try to be the hero and they find out about my daughter, if you compromise her safety trying to save me—I will never forgive you."

He stops moving, then, and she tosses the invisibility cloak over the both of them, just in time for the darkness to dissipate.

"Well, well, what do we have here?" an unfamiliar voice calls out, just as another whispers the disarming curse and Hermione feels her wand fly out of her hand.

Then another set of hands are on her wrists, and she has to quell the age-old panic that always returns when another's sweaty skin touches hers; tries to stay calm even as her hands are roughly tugged behind her back, tightly bound with coarse rope.

(As she feels control over her body and her life slip out of her hands.)

It takes everything in her to keep from jerking her face to where the boys are while she internally pleads with them to do as she says.

(This is the only way they all make it.)

"What's your name, girl?"

"Penelope Clearwater," she says, carefully modulating her voice, trying to show just the right amount of fear—the way a half-blood would, scared of the situation but knowing they're not the target.

Not claiming to be a pure-blood, which surely they'd know, but a half-blood—beneath their suspicion.

"Blood status?"

"Half-blood."

"Hm. What's a half-blood doing using the Dark Lord's name in Godric's Hollow in the middle of the night for, then?"

She swallows heavily, trying to look sorrowful. "I was—I had to stop in the area, so while I was here I was paying my respects. To the Dark Lord's t-temporary fall—and celebrating his recent return to power. I'm sorry I forgot about the taboo, I—I got caught up in my emotions and sought to address Him by name. I know it was a mistake."

"Did I hear her right, Stan?"

"Sure did, Scabior, sir. Pay 'er respects, she says."

"Interesting." Scabior analyzes her face, and she tries not to flinch as she feels the unnamed third Death Eater's breath on the back of her neck.

"So, Penelope," he stretches out the name, enunciating each syllable as he steps closer and closer. "What makes a half-blood so devoted to our side she's paying respects tonight? Don't you have a muggle parent—shouldn't you be on that idiotic side, with Dumbledore's ghost and every other bleedin' hero wannabe in Britain?"

This much, she can answer; had dark moments once upon a time that give her the exact rationale. "I-I do have a muggle father. My mother died in childbirth, so I was only ever raised by m-muggles. And they were horrible, and abusive; the parents made being at home hell, and the muggle children in school were awful bullies who treated me like a monster for being different. All of them are horrible. I'm glad to be rid of them; once I found out I was a witch I never looked back."