The Cell

Chapter 4: Day 6, Boiling point

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hate so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

- James Baldwin

"Merlin, Granger, are you even trying?"

Hermione sat back and pulled in a slow breath, trying to soothe the pounding behind her eyes.

"Has it occurred to you that maybe you're just a shite teacher?"

Malfoy scoffed at the very idea of such a thing, and Hermione had to suppress the urge to reach over and smack him. They had been practicing for over an hour now and she just couldn't focus enough to keep everything straight. She felt as if she were standing on one foot, in the middle of an ice rink, trying to balance 50 china plates on her head, and Malfoy wasn't getting any nicer about it.

"Okay, let's go again," she said, trying once more to recenter herself.

"Sure – I'll make it good," he said, a vicious glint in his eye. She bit back a shudder. Every time she thought they had made some modicum of progress in toleration, they were at one another's throats again.

After having had a near-civil conversation the day before, it was as if Malfoy were going out of his way to be an arse to her, and the most frustrating part was that she couldn't tell which side of him was an act.

As a general rule he was snarky and quick to insult, but there were flashes, moments, where he could be begrudgingly kind, so much so that he seemed to surprise himself. That said, there were also moments when he could be vindictive and cruel for no other reason than for the sake of doing it. That facet of his personality was more difficult to reconcile.

He uttered the spell, she fought, and, once again, she lost.

It was an early morning in July and the house was quiet. An adult Hermione had just finished shrinking and stuffing the few remaining possessions from her childhood bedroom into her beaded bag with shaking hands. She stopped and looked around the space, lips pressed into a tight line.

Once full of books and drawings, untouched toys from her youth next to scrolls and magical texts, it now felt barren. Her floral bedspread had been replaced with a generic blue guestroom set; her wardrobe sat empty save for some old boxes of muggle books and her father's suitcases from when he would travel for work. And all of her photographs had been removed from the windowsill and the wall over her desk.

Her heart ached at the complete removal of herself from a space that had, at one point, been wholly hers. Hermione grabbed her bag and wand off the duvet and stepped into the hallway. Her parents were downstairs in the kitchen having their morning tea.

As she walked past family photos, she dragged her wand along the wall beneath them and muttered under her breath, watching as she slowly dissolved from the frames, the other persons shifting around as needed to make the changes inconspicuous.

She stopped in the hall outside her parents' room before stepping inside and taking the small photo of herself off their dresser. She had spent the past couple weeks slowly removing herself from the less obvious places in their lives. School records, insurance forms, scrapbooks... she'd even gone into the attic and taken the Christmas ornaments with her name on them.

"Hermione?" she heard her mother call from downstairs.

"Coming, Mum," she replied, desperately trying to stop her voice from shaking,

The vision shifted. Malfoy was purposely looking for her painful memories, the things that hurt her. While she understood it was intended to motivate her, she couldn't shake the sense of violation.