crumple - dramione

one

"Crumple-Horned Snorkack."

The code words are whispered hotly in Hermione's ear, and her eyes fly as wide as they can with the bruises and the swelling that disfigure her face, thanks to her enthusiastic welcome to the dungeons. Her heart stutters in her chest, and she forces herself not to turn around and meet the eyes of the man who had known the code . She doesn't want to draw attention, just in case they are being watched. He must be an informant – someone sympathetic to the Order's goals, or potentially even a double agent. Because that is who the code is meant to identify – someone who she can trust, someone who might be able to help her, somehow. She might not die here, after all.

Hermione swallows hard, throat raw and dry as she stares across the dark, torch-lit cell at the brutalised, skeletal prisoners who are seemingly catatonic, their clothing rags and their flesh sore-ridden. The cells are crowded, but only women occupy this section of the dungeons. Adrenaline sets a fire in her veins and her bruised fingers flex, scraping on the dank dungeon stones, sending sharp pains running up her bones, terminating in her fingertips, which have bloodied wounds where her nails once sat neatly – now ragged and broken away. She had thought she was as good as dead when they took her, at least a day ago now. Stripped her of her broken wand and beat her, until blackness had reached up through the pain and swallowed her whole. She had woken here to the sounds of screams echoing from elsewhere in the dungeons.

And now – now she has the barest spark of hope .

"You don't exist." She murmurs the countersign, words barely intelligible through her split, swollen lips. Something touches her hair then – fingers reaching through the bars, curling hard in the wild, dirty strands and exerting enough pressure to hold her there, sitting on the damp, moss-slick stones with her upper body slumped to the bars. She stays very still and does not fight – it must be to fool someone walking past nearby, she tells herself, that dangerous grip on her hair. And even if it is not, what exactly can she do about it? She is helpless, utterly and completely, and the man whose fingers twine in her hair is currently her only hope of getting a message out to the Order.

Unless the enemy have tortured the codes out of another captured Order member, and this is all just a trick. She feels ill, fear threading through her as the pull on her scalp increases, creating sharp little stabbing tugs of pain. She whimpers and squirms on the floor involuntarily. The man speaks at her ear again, muffled, his breath falling over her ear and jaw in hot puffs.

"There's a Snatcher watching us. I – I'm sorry, about this," he says, fast and blurred, voice low, and his tone is angry and ashamed in a way that makes Hermione even more afraid than she already is. "So sorry."

She barely has time to process what he has actually said, before a scream breaks her lips. Her hands shove uselessly at the dungeon floor and try to push her up as the man's hand wrenches upwards on her hair, tearing it out at the roots and making tears flood her eyes. Her bare feet can't get purchase on the mossy stones and she scrabbles helplessly, initial screams falling to wretched animalistic moans and cries, her hands flailing and shoving at the ground, back arching and her scalp is on fire.

A hand cages her breast then as she arches and twists, and shock slams through her – revulsion, horror. Those feelings are quickly chased down by hot agony as the hand squeezes through her shirt, until it feels like her whole breast is a mass of molten metal on her chest. Hermione forgets that this man is apparently here to help her, because he is hurting her and it hurts and it hurts, and she screams and thrashes and weeps and begs in a horrible choking slew of pleading. She struggles and tries to escape the pain, but his hand on her breast and in her hair hold her still, and she is weak – beaten and dehydrated and half-starved. And he is not. He is strong and he is hurting her.