Chapter Text
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CAPTIVITY
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“Are you…using magic?”
She asked the question between languid exhalations, closing her eyes and leaning back into his addictive ministrations as his long, deft fingers worked their way through her unbound tresses, his fingernails scratching her scalp in ten little luscious circles.
When he laughed, she could feel the low rumble resonating through his hands.
“No, milaya. This is not magic. Has no one ever done this for you?”
She scanned her past, considering, not for the first time, what it said about her as a person that she had a litany of one-night adventures and a couple of ongoing friends-with-benefits scenarios, but no real relationships. At least, not until now, with whatever this was – or whatever it might be allowed to become, given the circumstances.
“No,” she sighed, feeling the cold metal prison bars press into her shoulder blades through her shift and the clammy discomfort of the stone floor on her bare calves, as Antonin dug his nails into her hair with just a bit more delicious pressure.
Her lips quirked into a soft, wry smile as she idly wondered how on earth she had gotten to this point – craving the touch of the man who had almost killed her.
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ONE MONTH EARLIER
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Hermione still possessed just enough cerebral energy to contemplate the bizarre, careening twists of fate that had driven her to the absurdity of this precise instant: that of her being forced to change out of her clothes into her new prison vestments while none other than Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle Jr. stood in front of her and watched.
They had both become Azkaban guards. She reflected, as she unzipped her faithful, faded mauve hoodie and handed it over to Goyle, that, all things considered, it was probably as good as either of them were ever going to do.
She was aware that this dire striptease was meant to be an additional punishment, an intentional humiliation. But she did not rail against it. She knew she would have to be smart now, and, thus, as she unzipped her muggle denims, she bridled her tongue – and her wrath.
She had shown up here today, escorted by the aurors who had once been her colleagues, deliberately dressed as a mudblood in one last act of defiance, because she still contemplated if her heritage, in the end, was part of why they had all turned on her with such venom.
But she also had to acknowledge, if only to herself, as she kicked off her sandals and, with just the slightest tremble of her wrists, reached back to unclasp her bra beneath the unwavering gazes of her guards, that there was a part of her – a tiny but insistent sliver, glimmering like a crescent moon – that said she might deserve what happened to her. That she truly was as horrible as the Daily Prophet made her out to be.
The sorting hat had warned her, after all, when she was eleven, whispering words in her ear during the deliberation which, thankfully, only she had heard – shameful words, words she had never shared with another soul in all those intervening years.
“Are you sure you want Gryffindor, my dear? You could just as easily fit into Slytherin, you know. You have the heart of a lion, but the blood of a snake.”
As Hermione tossed her discarded lace bra to a leering Crabbe, refusing to let herself weep or snivel beneath his mortifying, dough-faced scrutiny, she reasoned that, despite how she had tried to bury the memory, perhaps the hat had been right all along.
Changing out of her own knickers, trying to pretend she was anywhere else, she regarded the strangely whimsical choice in underwear she had made that morning: a red cotton background with orange fuzzy cats that reminded her of the dearly departed Crookshanks.
At least he did not live to see me reduced to this, she thought.
Crabbe studied her all the while with an expression of superiority, as much as his toadish mien could muster, and what appeared to be a dose of revolting lust at her nakedness.
But Goyle actually looked sad, and a bit curious, like a child, as he handed her the new, steel-grey panties and bralette, the same dull shade as the frigid sea that surrounded them.
“What happened to you, there?” he asked, as Crabbe rolled his eyes.
In another life she would have immediately objected to such nosy impertinence, but she again reminded herself that she would need to tread carefully here.
If I can befriend him, it might help me, in the coming months.
She remembered that Goyle was never exactly the instigator in Draco’s gang, back at Hogwarts – that there was a hapless quality to him, and it seemed like he had forged an alliance with the bullies mostly in order to prevent himself from becoming a target.
“This?” she asked, as she pointed to the the four red vertical, parallel lines above her left hip bone, before she swiftly stepped into the new underwear. “It’s a birthmark. I’ve just…had it, ever since I was born,” she explained, pulling the bralette over her head.
She had never liked it and had, in the past, been rather hesitant for anyone to see it, but she now resented that mark far less than the row of four numbers that had, just a few painful minutes ago, been magically tattooed on the side of her neck, a designator that she knew would remain emblazoned on her pale flesh even long after her residence here ended.
She picked up the basic white shift they had handed her – the kind of garment they would have issued to a condemned woman on her way to the scaffold, in the olden days, her hair pulled up in a cap to render the stroke of steel unimpeded – as Goyle spoke again, seeming almost bashful while Crabbe let out an annoyed sigh.
“Well,” he muttered, “I meant the thing…between your…you know.”
It would have been funny, on a different day – his inability to say “breasts.”
But, as she pulled the tunic down over herself, grateful at least that this apocalyptically embarrassing ordeal was now concluded, she knew what “thing” he had meant: the single, elongated line bisecting her chest, in a bruised aubergine shade that never faded.
“That scar came from the night some of us went to the Department of Mysteries, during our fifth year,” she explained, knowing he would likely remember rumors of the incident.
She put her dainty feet into the ratty white slippers as she finished her answer.
“I was hit with a curse, from one of the death eaters. Antonin Dolohov.”
To her surprise, Vincent Crabbe, for some reason she could not divine, threw back his stocky head in raucous laughter, clearly finding this response hilarious.
But while Crabbe looked triumphant, Goyle suddenly looked worried.
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A mere month ago, Hermione Jean Granger had been rising to a position of prominence in the Ministry of Magic. As opposed to the plain, pallid shift that now draped over her petite frame like a potato sack as she was taken, shackled at the wrists, through the long corridors of the triangular tower that would be her new home, in her working life she had always worn crisp, midnight blue skirt suits and posh pumps to work each day, after carefully brewing a bolstering shot of espresso each morning, of course.
Everything had been going according to plan. She had a fulfilling career (now destroyed), friends (or so she had thought), and a beautiful penthouse flat (now sold to cover her legal fees). She was no longer dating Ron – that had only lasted for a month or so, the summer after the Battle of Hogwarts, before they realized it was a misbegotten impulse on both their parts – but was still genuinely glad to count him as her most loyal comrade. In fact, the two of them had just attended Harry and Ginny’s wedding together when, the very next morning, the Daily Prophet had arrived on her doorstep with tidings that would permanently alter the direction of her heretofore orderly and responsible life.
It had all started with that confounded bitch, Rita Skeeter.
She had gotten tired of turning her damnable quill on others, apparently, and had decided to write a memoir – in which she had taken it upon herself to finally tell the wizarding world that Hermione had kidnapped her and kept her in a jar for a year.
It was only a bloody week, Hermione groused, as the three of them passed a wasted, tattered prisoner with sunken eyes who wailed and reached his arms through the bars of his cell to try and grab her legs, receiving a swift, punitive zap from the wand of Crabbe.
But the media was Rita’s instrument, and she played it like a virtuoso, sobbing in her press interviews about the “TrAuMa!!!” of being stuck behind the glass, her thick mascara running down her pasty face as she daubed her cheeks with an embroidered handkerchief. It was thoroughly beyond Hermione’s comprehension how Rita was not the one in jail right now, instead of her, since the witch had outed herself as being an unregistered animagus, but she had somehow spun the revelation into an empowerment angle.
“This is who I am – I can’t hide it anymore – and I’m proud to be a beetle, darling. And as Circe is my witness I’ll never be emotionally or physically imprisoned again!!!”
That was the first hole in the dike. Then, the rest of the headlines came rushing through.
GRANGER DANGER! MARIETTA EDGECOMBE PERMANENTLY DISFIGURED!
GOLDEN GIRL ATTEMPTED TO DISMANTLE ENTIRETY OF HOUSE ELF CULTURE!
GRANGER RUTHLESSLY HEXED STAR ATHLETE AT HOGWARTS, MCLAGGEN TESTIFIES!
DRACO MALFOY REVEALS SHOCKING PHYSICAL ATTACK BY HIS FORMER CLASSMATE!
SLAYER OF NAGINI AND ESTEEMED HERBOLOGY PROFESSOR NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM ONCE SUBJECTED TO A FULL BODY BIND BY HIS SUPPOSED FRIEND HERMIONE! (DUMBLEDORE TRIED TO BUY HIS SILENCE WITH HOUSE POINTS!)
All of that, sadly, had been more or less true.
But then, she reflected, as the guards brought her down the stairs to the lowest level of Azkaban, the lying and dogpiling had begun in earnest. The magical social network, Warble – toxic heap of negativity that it was – had rapidly exploded with hashtags like #cancelgranger, #hermionegrangerisoverparty, #mealsoaswell, as it seemed like everyone started turning on her with undue vitriol simply to harvest their own grain of attention, fabricating slights and abuses that had genuinely never happened, bringing a new meaning to the term “witch hunt.” She only barely had time to assemble a defense before everything moved to trial, wizarding “justice” progressing much more quickly than muggle proceedings, but she realized too late that this occasion had become the opening for anyone who had ever resented her, even as a result of her doing the right thing, to tear into her carcass like a hyena – because, no matter what happened with her appeal, she was, professionally speaking, now dead. When the gavel had slammed down and the magistrate sentenced her to a year in Azkaban for her “multitudinous crimes”, she could not even hear the woman’s voice, being so thoroughly disoriented by the alacrity with which her entire, carefully-manicured existence had been upended.
“Where are you taking me?” she whispered to Goyle, as a wide metal door was opened.
“You’re being stowed down here in the overflow section,” he answered, a nervous quality to his voice. “The prison is too full right now, and has been ever since the war ended, honestly. I…I wish we could have put you somewhere else.”
The layers of implication were lost on her as she surveyed her new surroundings.
The dungeon was not large, just two rows of three or four cells, windowless and all separated by blackened iron bars, with a small aisle in the middle so that the guards could walk betwixt them. It looked, at first, as if Hermione would be the only prisoner in the area. Crabbe utilized a key to open the first cell on the left, then roughly pushed her into it, his thick hand shoving into the small of her back, while Goyle used his wand to dissolve the restraints on her hands and closed the metal gate behind her.
“Sleep tight, Granger Danger,” Crabbe cackled, as the two of them walked away from her, with Goyle casting one final, piteous look over his shoulder before they left.
She let out a breath she had not known she was holding when she was blessedly alone, taking a few seconds to investigate her own cell. It was small, not much larger than the walk-in closet her mother had enjoyed when Hermione was a child.
Thank Merlin that I was never able to undo their obliviation, she reflected, for the first time grateful that her parents were beyond her – beyond all this shame.
There was a pervasively musty, stale scent in her nostrils, but she was immensely relieved to note that there was a tiny, closed-off loo facility in the corner. Hermione had not been sure, previously, if it would be like muggle prisons where everything was out in the open, uncertain of how much more mortification she could have borne. She did know that the prisoners were not allowed real baths here, that the guards came by every day to do some sort of basic, Spartan cleaning charm – and she had heard that, if the criminals did not behave themselves, the spell would be withheld.
She observed a recess cut into the back wall of stone, forming the shape of a long bench, which she guessed was for sleeping, but nothing else existed in the space.
Even without the Dementors, Azkaban was every bit as cold as she had been warned it would be. She stared up at the light bulb, touching her arms under her sleeves, and, after a few seconds of concentration, whispered the wandless warming spell that Charlie Weasley had been teaching her for the last two weeks.
“Recalfacio.”
She felt a surge of gratitude towards Charlie at the same time that she felt the warmth bleed through her limbs. It was an incantation he had always used when working in the harsh Romanian winters, studying the mountain dragons whose pearlescent scales blended in with the snow. She had been unsure of whether she could ever master a wandless spell before, but her looming sentence had proved quite the motivator.
She flashed back to the night before, to the way the entire Weasley clan had poured out their desperate affection to her at the Burrow – to her best friend, who had stayed with her all through the night, holding her as she shook and cried, his red hair, long and shaggy again, falling on her face as he leaned over and tried his best to comfort her.
“It won’t be long, Mione. We’ll get you out of this.”
All of the Weasleys (except one) had sprung to Hermione’s passionate defense in the wake of “GrangerGate,” every single one of them helping her in the best way they knew how – even Percy, who was assisting with assembling documents for her appeal.
The silence of Harry, on the other hand, had been cacophonous.
Her friend was different from the boy she had known, even before her “cancellation”. It was hard to put her finger on exactly when the alteration in their dynamic had started – or perhaps there had always been troubling signs that, out of love, she had neglected to notice. It was just that, in her time of turmoil, the distance had become glaring.
He had been cursorily conciliatory in private, but had explained that, with his burgeoning political career (to her shock, and Ron’s, too, Harry now had aspirations to be the Minister of Magic one day) and Ginny’s rapidly ascending profile with the Harpies, supporting Hermione in public was not a risk he could take at present. Many others had also found her too damaging, so, in the end, her sole bulwark had been the Burrow.
She was so lost in her reverie just then – cherishing the bittersweet recollections of her last hugs, her last inhalations of their familial scent (butter and cinnamon and fresh-baked bread), her last worried glances from all of those forget-me-not blue eyes – that she had not noticed that there was, indeed, a prisoner in the cell next to hers.
He had been standing on the far wall, beyond the range of the lone bulb in his section of the stone ceiling, but when he took his first step, it jolted her out of her melancholic reverie.
And what she saw purloined her breath.
Hermione was so utterly exhausted, even more so than when she had been hunting for Horcruxes (with “the boy who lived”, now “the man who disdained”), unable to sleep much at all since the sentence came down from on high, that, for a few heartbeats, she disassociated. She forgot where she was standing, and why, and simply lost herself in the inquisitive examination of her new and mesmerizing compatriot.
He was an impressive man.
Long before she noticed the numbers on his neck (1380, she would later note) or the snake and skull on his arm, Hermione found herself tumbling through the enticing, rich mahogany of his eyes, like Lucy Pevensie traversing through the wardrobe – her first foray into a universe she never knew existed, but which she was destined to claim.
He was tall – a few inches over six feet, if she had to hazard a guess – and even in his drab, shapeless, standard issue white uniform, she could still discern the cords of clean, taut muscle in his frame, which she would soon learn were maintained by diligent calisthenics (“We must occupy ourselves somehow, milaya, or we will go mad”).
There was something in his expression that pinioned her – something she did not yet realize was the manifestation of a fervent wish, a zeal curated by long and tender years.
She failed to recognize him initially, because he looked vastly different from how he appeared that night they dueled in the café, so long ago. His hair, the lush, thick brown of the chocolate on a jaffa cake, was much longer now, twisting in tempting curls at the back of his neck, and his beard had grown out over his well-hewn cheekbones. When he gripped the bars of the cell, she noted the strange loveliness of his hands – large, with long fingers, the type that seemed better suited for playing guitar than slinging curses.
So it was only when he spoke to her, in an accented voice that frightened her with its latent musical hypnotism, that she realized exactly who was occupying the cell.
“Finally, my ghanima. You have come to me.”
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For the first week in Azkaban, despite his polite, surprisingly gentle entreaties, Hermione Granger outright refused to talk to Antonin Dolohov.
It was not out of any resentment for her wound. Neither Madame Pomfrey nor Professor Snape had been able to divine the precise structure of the curse he had used in the Department of Mysteries five years before, but both of them had agreed that, if Dolohov had wanted her dead, she would have been dead. The fact that he had been silenced when he cast the spell actually had nothing to do with her survival. In a distant, academic way, she recognized that neither she nor any of her schoolmates had any business waltzing into the Ministry that night, and, despite the lingering scar, she appreciated that the death eater had opted not to curse her something much, much worse.
No, it was not a grudge for the past, but rather fear for the present.
Hermione had not even known that Antonin Dolohov was back in Azkaban. The last she had heard, he had escaped, for the fifth time – and, as she watched him slowly pace in his cell, his penetrating gaze never departing from her, she very much doubted it would be long before the sixth escape occurred. The wizard was legendary. He could perform, with phenomenal dexterity, spells that lesser men never even knew existed. And, although it might have been paranoia, she was scared to speak in his presence – scared that, once he heard her voice, he might be able to use some forbidden arcane sorcery to steal it, to bend her very soul to his implacable will.
“Are you afraid of me, milaya?” he asked her, on the second day.
She would have expected the question to be a brittle taunt, but his tone was shockingly soothing as he once again grasped the bars, slowly cocking his head to the side, the light from the ceiling lamp illuminating the strangely enticing pattern of stubble on the underside of his jaw – which she chided herself for finding intriguing.
Get it together, you rapacious slut, she admonished. This is the last man you need to be mooning over. He could kill you and not lose a millisecond of sleep over it.
And yet, before she could stop herself, she nodded in response to his query.
“I will not hurt you, my little witch,” he promised, reaching out his hand through the bars. “I would never hurt you, ponimayesh? Do you understand? I only wish to….”
But she would not, could not take his hand, nor open her mouth.
Instead, she retreated a step, shaking her head.
He recalled the offered arm, the rest of his sentence, whatever it would have been, lost to the ether as he scratched his beard in a contemplative motion.
“Are you hesitant to use your voice, because you fear my magic?”
She would have been unsettled at how he read her mind, but she had never been in possession of a proverbial “poker face” – and, even if she had been, she knew he would not have accrued the reputation he now owned if not for a keen sense of perception.
Again, without precisely intending to, she nodded.
He inclined his head, in a strangely chivalric gesture of respect.
“And this is why you are my umnitsa.”
She wondered why he was employing the “my” pronoun in front of his endearments, implying a degree of fondness, despite their lack of any previous verbal interaction.
She wondered what those endearments actually meant.
And she wondered if it was, after all, so very obvious – her lifelong weakness for praise.
“You were wise to be concerned,” he continued. “Thinking that, once I heard you speak, I might have an avenue to control you, da? Such a spell does exist,” he explained, his dark eyes taking on a naughty glint as he touched his index finger to his chest.
“And I do know it,” he added – his inflection confidential, his regard unflinching.
Something about his admission, about the known immensity of his abilities, sent a chill through her frame, despite the previous application of Charlie’s wandless warming spell.
I do not find this attractive.
I do NOT find this attractive.
“But it takes an egregious amount of potentia to perform,” he clarified, “and I happen to be saving that energy for something important. Plus,” he said, raising a devastating eyebrow, “I would never use such callous, ugly sorcery on you, krasavitsa.”
It was imperative, she thought, that she remain silent – that she ignore his charm.
But then again, perhaps he did not need her voice. Perhaps Dolohov had already entranced her. Because, as he smirked at her through the bars, a pair of dimples blooming beneath his beard, she found that, as much as he seemed incapable of looking at anything but her, she could not manage to stop looking at him, either.
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In her defense, there was little else to do but look at him.
To pass the unremitting time, she tried counting all the bars in her cell, and then mapping the cracks in the stone wall, seeing what shapes she could divine in the fissures, like a child looking at the clouds which she was no longer allowed to behold.
A house.
A dog.
An acorn.
Scabbers.
Pansy Parkinson’s French bob haircut.
She tried reciting, in her head, all of Shakespeare’s monologues that she could remember, recalling the best of the pep talks, hyping herself up to stay resilient.
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war.
And she tried practicing, with an imaginary wand, all of the spells that she knew by heart, to keep her skills sharp for the day that she might be freed.
Oppugno.
Silencio.
Wingardium Leviosa.
Salvio Hexia.
Incendio.
Bombardo.
Alohomora.
Confundo.
But even amidst these august intellectual pursuits, her neighbor, although he had not yet pried open her mouth, had a way of always redirecting her focus towards him.
His exercise regime alone was riveting. She should have shunned him, should have scooted as far away from him as her cell would allow and kept her eyes pried on any other object, but she was soon stealing furtive glances at the way the tendons in his forearms shifted when he did dips or push-ups, and the little grunts and heavy breaths she heard while he was engaging in sit-ups and lunges were perpetually…distracting.
Suggestive, even.
Come on, 'Mione, mind out of the gutter, came Ron’s distant, teasing voice.
But it wasn’t just the workouts. There was something inherently beguiling about him, in every decision and articulation – and in the conversations that he still, not one to be easily rebuffed, attempted to initiate. The rhythm of his speech, the geography of his birth lending a layer to his English that was, unfortunately for Hermione, endlessly captivating. The little tic he had where his tongue would slip out from between his lips, in the corners of his mouth, whenever he was thinking hard about something – or how he bit his bottom lip before he was about to say something mischievous, lines crinkling around his dark, twinkling eyes. The way that, reflexively, as he traipsed around his cell, he would fiddle with the hem of his shirt or run his hands through his hair, making her own hands envious. It was all a bit too much to successfully spurn.
She knew it wasn’t helping that it had been a while since she’d been rocked by anyone but her own wand. And now even that had been taken from her, locked away in some box on the lowest basement level of the ministry, much like the Ark of the Covenant, never to be seen again. She doubted she would ever get it back even if she was released.
And thus she was stuck in the quagmire of her own thirst and lunacy, trying not to cultivate a crush on the man whose curse had, a decade before, crushed her windpipe.
She attempted to be surreptitious in how she watched him, but she didn’t realize that he knew, all along, the effect he was having on her, until one day he spun around randomly in the middle of one of his enticing stretches and caught her staring.
And then the smooth bastard had the temerity to wink at her.
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He had nothing but time in Azkaban – and he used it all to seduce her.
From her very first night there, he started shaping origami trinkets for her from the toilet paper rolls that he had saved, almost as if he had known she was coming – a crane, a parrot, a frog, a rabbit. (The bunny made her think of Luna, who had gone missing a year ago on a magical creature expedition in the Arctic. But Hermione never got the sense her friend was dead, exactly. She would not be surprised if Luna emerged from some ensorcelled gnome cave twenty years from now, the same age as she was when she disappeared, her lithe arms full of glowing mushrooms and mysterious artifacts.)
Dolohov would actually keep making her the gifts even after he had shattered her obstinate resilience, once going so far as to craft her a paper diamond (“Until I can get you a real one, krasavitsa,” he would whisper, decimating her with a tenderness, coming from a man so vicious, which would never cease to leave her in awe).
But it was not the origami which won her over, which summoned her tongue.
It was knowledge she craved, always – and Antonin Dolohov had it in spades.
“Do you want to learn to speak Russian, umnitsa?” he would ask, with a wicked grin.
“Do you want to know why I made the curse that marked you?”
“Do you want to know why I call you my ghanima, little witch?”
“Do you want to know why I deliberately let myself be re-captured last week?”
“Do you want to know how I plan to escape – how we will escape, malen'kaya plennitsa?”
And the unspoken answer from Hermione was always the same, until it finally broke free of her heart and tumbled out of her desperate lips as her needy fingers dashed between the iron bars to grasp the collar of his uniform shirt in supplication.
“Yes. Yes. Yes. I want to know. I want it all.”
His smile in that moment was as sharp as a scimitar blade.
And then he brought her hands to his lips, softly kissing each set of knuckles in turn, leaving her unable to muzzle an overwhelmed gasp at how bloody forward he was, how she had given an inch and he had taken a mile, and how she had fucking liked it.
He did not release her hands for a while, simply rubbing her palms with his thumbs as he stared at her with overt desire, stepping as close to her as the metal bars would allow.
“I will give you everything you need, krasavitsa,” he growled.