She'd been alright yesterday. She'd been so horrified and angry. She'd run several miles. But now—
She couldn't—
It was all so much.
She didn't remember the world feeling so wide before. The sky was so...high. The paths just went on and on. She didn't know where they ended.
Her hands started shaking and twitching as she thought about it. She was going to be sick.
She wanted to go back to her room.
She wanted to press herself into a corner and feel walls against her.
She stared down at her feet and felt tears pricking the corners of her eyes. Panic was rising up through her like a tide. Her heart kept going faster and faster. It felt like a fluttering bird caged inside her chest, beating itself to death as it tried to escape.
Hermione pressed her hands over her mouth and tried to keep from hyperventilating.
A sharp sound abruptly caught her attention, and she looked over to find Malfoy was gripping his newspaper so tightly his knuckles were white. His hands were shaking faintly.
She gasped and stumbled away.
“Sorry — sorry—,” she stammered in terror. “I'm going—“
She only made it a few feet before her legs refused to carry her further.
She was afraid of being near Malfoy, but even he didn't supercede the terror that swallowed her as she tried to walk forward. Her lungs felt like all the air had been pressed out of them. She opened her mouth and tried to gasp for breath. It wouldn't go in.
The terror was sinking into her as though a creature had slid its claws into her back. Dragging them down her spine. Tearing her open. Exposing all the muscles and nerves and bones to the cold winter air, and she was dying.
She couldn't breathe.
The world felt like it was tilting sideways.
There were needles sinking into her hands and arms.
All she could see was the open—
She couldn't stop shaking. Couldn't stop panicking. She couldn't go—
It was so open. A void. Nothing. Nothing. Forever. She was all alone in it.
Not even walls. Nothing.
She could scream forever. No sound.
No one would come.
There was darkness eating up the sky.
Then there'd be nothing.
No one would come.
She couldn't—
“Stop,” was suddenly growled from behind her.
Reality crashed down on her like a flood. She started and looked back. Malfoy was pale-faced, and his eyes were flashing as he stared at her.
“You're required to be outside. You are not required to go traipsing off. Do not give yourself a mental breakdown that compromises my access to your memories.”
His face twisted slightly as he kept looking at her. Drawing his wand, he conjured another chair.
“Sit. And calm down,” he commanded in an icy tone.
Hermione dragged in a deep breath and let her feet carry her over. Trying not to dwell on the flood of relief that came over her. She seated herself and stared down at her hands as she worked to regain control of her breathing.
She was in a chair. She was in a chair next to Malfoy. She was not in a void. There wasn't a void. There was marble under her feet. She didn't have to go anywhere. She was in a chair.
She inhaled slowly. To a count of four.
Exhale, through her mouth. To a count of six.
In and out.
Again and again.
She was in a chair. She didn't have to go anywhere.
Her heart slowly stopped pounding, but her whole chest hurt.
Once her chest's stuttering eased, she tried to force her fingers to stop twitching. They wouldn't, so she sat on them.
As her mind fully cleared from her panic, a lash of bitter despair struck her.
She was broken.
She was.
There was no point in trying to deny it.
Mentally, something inside of her had fractured during her imprisonment, and she didn't know how to fix it. She couldn't reason her way through it. It swallowed her from the inside.
She stared down at her lap. Tears slid from the corners of her eyes, down her cheeks, and along her lips before falling. The sharp cut of the wind made them feel like ice on her skin. She smeared them away and drew her cloak around herself more tightly. Pulling up the hood.
The cloak was almost smothering her with the warmth it provided, but Hermione still felt cold with horror as she sat silently on the veranda. Trying to think.
She'd been alright. Yesterday. She'd been alright. Why? Why hadn't it bothered her then?
Some kind of agoraphobia. It must be. Somehow, in the cell without light or sound or time, she'd latched onto the security of the walls. The containment had become the only constant in her life. So now, whenever she was free of the urgent horror of her current situation; whenever she had time to think…
The sense of openness created a fear that swallowed her.
Outdoors was far worse than the hallway upstairs.
Maybe she'd just been unprepared. Maybe now that she knew, she'd be able to push through the panic. If she gave herself manageable goals: Walk down the steps. Walk across the gravel. Walk to the hedge.
If she paced herself.
She certainly wasn't going to be getting lost in the hedge maze anytime soon.
Her stomach twisted. Her timeline for escape kept getting longer. She hadn't even had a chance to investigate options for getting away. The longer she took—
She might get pregnant.
She might already be pregnant. If she weren't, every additional month being ordered over that table increased the odds that she would be.
She wanted to cry.
She glanced over at Malfoy who was studying Quidditch scores avidly.
What useful information was she supposed to learn about him? All he did was seethe and read and then go away and murder people.
She was never going to escape. She was probably going to die on the estate.
She studied him in despair.
He was just cold. Angry.
Icy rage seemed to hang over him. She could feel the Dark Magic twisting around his edges.
Who did he hate so much? Was he like Lucius, blaming the Order for Narcissa's death? Were all those Killing Curses revenge? Was that what fueled his rise?
Everything about him had changed. There didn't appear to be even a shred of the boy she had known so many years before.
He had grown, taller and broader. The haughtiness of his school days had faded, replaced by a palpable sense of power. Deadly assurance.
His face had lost every trace of boyishness. It was cruelly beautiful. His sharp aristocratic features set in a hard unyielding expression. His grey eyes were like knives. His hair still that pale, white blond, combed carelessly aside.
He looked, every inch of him, like an indolent English Lord. Except for the almost inhuman coldness. If an assassin's blade were made into a man, it would take the form of Draco Malfoy.
She stared at him. Taking him in.
Beautiful and damned. A fallen angel.
Or perhaps, the Angel of Death.
While she was studying him, he closed the newspaper crisply and looked over at her. She met his eyes for a moment before glancing away.
“What is wrong with you?” he asked after staring at her several seconds.
She flushed faintly and didn't answer.
“If you won't tell me, I will just pull the answer from your mind,” he said.
Hermione struggled not to flinch at the threat. She stared steadily at the hedge.
“I–I think it's called agoraphobia,” she said after taking several deep breaths. “Something about — about open spaces makes me panic.”
“Why?”
“I don't know. It's not like it's rational,” she said bitterly as she inspected the stitching of her cloak. The uniform needlework was something orderly to stare at. Something predictable. Something that made sense. Something unlike her irrational mind.