The Cell

Chapter 10: Day 30, Bargaining

So you were never a saint

And I loved you in shades of wrong

We learn to live with the pain

Mosaic broken hearts

But this love is brave and wild

- Taylor Swift, State of Grace

It was the morning of the thirtieth day; the elf had just left the tray, and Draco sat vigil beside Hermione. She hadn't regained consciousness in over 24 hours, so dehydrated from sweating and crying that she didn't even need to use the bathroom.

He would try and drip water between her cracked lips, but, as she had so astutely pointed out, it didn't make any difference at this point.

He held her hand, her fragile fingers enveloped by his, and he felt her pulse, thready and weak. He didn't think it would be long now.

That was when, for the first time in his life, Draco Malfoy began to beg. For a miracle, some eleventh-hour phenomenon that allowed him to keep her. For her to stay. Sitting in the silent grey, he implored and pleaded with the universe not to take her away from him.

"Please don't leave me," he beseeched quietly, pressing their interlocked hands against his lips. "Please Hermione, please don't go. I can't be here without you. Please, please, please... "

He barely registered when tears breached his eyelids, silent confessions made to nobody rolling down his cheeks.

He curled around her and rested his head on her stomach, listening to her heart, still beating, still fighting, and eventually he let himself drift.

oOoOoOo

Draco was standing in the entryway of the great hall, students milling about all around him. It was too bright, everything oversaturated and vibrant, and the roaring background noise engulfed him like a wave as he fought to keep his head above the water.

He wasn't wearing his Hogwarts uniform, rather he was clad in muggle jeans, trainers and a black long-sleeve t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He looked down to see his forearm shockingly bare, just a smooth expanse of milky flesh, the likes of which he hadn't sported in nearly two years.

He ran his hand over it, as if he were waiting for the ink to rise to the surface, but it remained unblemished.

He looked around him at the students passing by, but they moved as if he weren't there. As he examined more closely, he saw that their faces were blank – not in the sense that they weren't expressive, but literally blank, devoid of eyes or a nose or a mouth, like an unfinished doll.

He felt his heart begin to pound in his chest, his skin crawling with the wrongness of all of it. Then, in the distance, a face caught his eye – partly because it was a face, an actual face, but mostly because it was her. Hermione.

He stepped toward her but she smiled over her shoulder at him and then turned in the other direction, ducking down a side passage.

He followed her, but as he rounded the corner he stopped. She was perhaps 30 paces away in the middle of the empty corridor, turned and staring at him. It was then that he realized this wasn't his Hermione at all.

Her hair was sleek and pulled into a twist at the base of her neck. Rather than being clad in Gryffindor colors as she usually was, her tie and the hood of her robes were silver and green. A crest with a snake curled in the middle of it lay over her left breast.