Vacivitas

Chapter One

There was a fire somewhere inside of Hermione, as there always would be. But it was buried deep beneath as many layers of silence as she could muster to keep it hidden, with no means with which to stoke the flames.

"Hermione?"

She manages a noise of acknowledgment.

"How many days do you think we've been down here?" Faye asks.

"I don't know."

"You've been here for seventy-five days, Faye." It's a male's voice this time–someone who has yet to grant anyone his name, but who Hermione has spent long hours talking to. He sounds bone-tired, weary in a way that highlights his resignation to his circumstances. "And you, Hermione, have been here for sixty-one."

Hermione casts a futile glance in the direction that his words hail from, wishing she had a mere sliver of light in order to see his face.

Sixty-one days.

Two months and one day.

She's unable to fathom the number, with the way the nights had melted into one another, but hearing it gives her some level of shock. It's hard to believe that she's been lying in the dark for two months with a group of unknown people who disappear one after the other. Whoever's got them trapped feeds them once per day, at the same time, and they all drift off to sleep shortly after. Sometimes, they wake to no one having been taken. Sometimes, like now, they wake to someone missing who they will never see again.

They never come back.

"How long have you been here?" she asks in the unnamed boy's direction.

"Me? Three hundred."

Hermione chokes back a gasp. Three hundred days that this boy has not only been here, but that this pit had been open and used.

Why haven't they taken him?

"I'm sorry," Faye says. Her voice is mature–she can't be any older than Hermione. "That's awful. Such a long time. Where did they...Where were you...?"

"Brighton," he says like he's telling her where he was born, not where he was violently and traumatically captured. "I was staying with a Muggle family."

"Did they know who you were?"

"No. But I made them think they did."

Hermione thinks of the way she made her parents think things, too.

"We all do things we have to do to survive," she says in a bid to soothe any guilt he may be harboring. "You didn't hurt them, did you?"

"No."

"Then you did nothing wrong."

"Yeah, nothing except accidentally using magic after Voldemort had the Ministry activate the Trace on our wands." He huffs a bitter laugh. "Can you believe it? I was too lazy to get out of bed. Forgot myself and used my wand to levitate my water into my hand. They destroyed the house, killed the family, and made it look like an accidental fire. Knocked me unconscious and I woke up here."