She looked up at Malfoy.
She was aware that she hated him. This was a piece of information that seemed of utmost importance, and yet she couldn't feel it. Hatred was a construct rather than an emotion.
He was staring at her intently.
“How do you feel, Mudblood?” he asked after a moment. His sharp eyes were taking in every detail, studying her face, and eyes, and posture as she stood before him. Her hands had stopped spasming; she realised when he glanced down at them. It was as though he were cataloguing her. Hermione felt her skin prickle with awareness, and a faint shiver ran down her spine, but she couldn't feel a corresponding wash of fear. Just awareness.
“Cold,” she answered. “My brain feels cold. What did you do to me?”
“It's intended to acclimatise you to the estate,” he said, stepping back as he continued to carefully appraise her. “So that I am no longer obliged to monitor you in person.”
Hermione said nothing. Her brain was analysing.
The unfamiliarity of the manor upset her. The unknown. It made her panic. The potion blocked that. She could go wherever she wanted now.
The potion blocked everything she realised. She wasn't sad. Or angry. Or ashamed. Her grief was gone. Her rage.
She was — nothing.
She simply existed in cold nothingness.
She looked up at Malfoy. “Is this what it feels like to be you?”
Chapter End Notes
Illustrations by Avendell, follow her on tumblr and instagram.
Chapter 11
Malfoy laughed faintly.
“Like it?” he asked.
She tilted her head to the side. He was easy to look at now that she didn't feel frightened or overwhelmed by her hatred of him. She did have a conscious awareness that he was dangerous, but her body didn't have any physical reaction. No twisting in her stomach. No tripled heart-rate. He could have been a statue.
“It feels like I'm dead,” she said.
He nodded as though the statement didn't surprise him.
“The effects are temporary. It will fade after twelve hours. And eventually you'll become immune. It should work long enough for you to acclimatise to the manor and estate.”
Hermione stared up at him.
“You're being different to me now. You're less mean. Why are you even doing this for me?” she said. She furrowed her brow in confusion. Apparently she was still able to feel confused.
He quirked an eyebrow and leaned forward so close his breath ghosted across her cheek.
“I'm not doing this for you, Mudblood,” he said softly into her ear. “I'm doing it for me. You wouldn't react anyway.”
He straightened.
“See? Nothing. No elevated pulse. No pounding heart. I could bring in a boggart or bend you over a table and you wouldn't blink. Not much fun.”
Hermione nodded thoughtfully. If she were wanting to commit suicide it would be easier to do so while under the effect of the potion. Malfoy might not be able to detect anything until too late.
Malfoy became stone-faced. He gestured toward the door. “Shall we?”
She went to get her cloak and followed him outside. He paused on the veranda and watched as she descended the steps by herself. The snow had been cleared from the gravel path but she could feel the cold already biting her toes through her shoes. It was bitterly cold that day.
She hesitated for a moment, trying to decide where to go. Then she walked over to the hedge maze. On all her walks with Malfoy he had never gone into it. She was quite curious about whether she could find her way through.
It was huge. The hedges towered over her. It made her recall the hedge maze from the Triwizard tournament. She doubted Malfoy's hedge would try to eat her or contained any dark creatures. She wandered through the looping, twisting, winding path and thought about the potion Malfoy had forced down her throat.
She'd had the passing thought that he was dosing himself with it in order to be such a cold and evil bastard, but she dismissed it after a moment's thought. The killing curse was emotion based magic. Impossible to cast with detachment.
Although, Malfoy seemed terrifyingly capable of somehow bending the rules around that curse.
Putting aside Malfoy and the mystery of his bottomless well of hatred, she could use the potion. She could make far more progress in pursuit of escape under the influence of the potion than she had been able to in the last month. So much so that it seemed suspiciously careless of Malfoy.
She paused to consider.
Malfoy was not careless. No matter how much he hated monitoring her. He wouldn't be careless. There must be some kind of failsafe that made him confident enough to dose her with something so powerful. He wouldn't possibly risk it otherwise, even if he found monitoring her to be a form of torture.
How could he be certain she wouldn't do anything when her heart-rate and pulse were unlikely to tip him off?
She'd quite nearly flung herself off a balcony and he'd only just stopped her. Known exactly when he needed to appear…
She looked down at her wrists.
He had to have sensed it through the manacles. But how had he known to come then but never bothered to appear during her panic attacks. A monitor charm, even a specialised one, couldn't possibly differentiate that precisely.
Unless…
Malfoy was somehow reading her mind through them—
As soon as the thought dawned on her she felt certain she was right. How, she wasn't sure. But she was willing to bet on it.
How irritating. She should be enraged but couldn't summon it. She should be swallowed by despair. But intellectual aggravation was as much as she could muster.
As though his legilimency wasn't invasive enough; trawling through her mind as though it were his own personal oyster bed. She was certain he was also somehow reading her mind through the manacles.
He never skimmed her thoughts. She had noticed. She remembered how Snape used to do that with students. Dip in through the eyes and glean what was forefront. When she made eye contact with Malfoy he never bothered to.
Hermione turned around. She stalked out of the hedge maze and made her way back to the veranda where Malfoy seemed immersed in a book on alchemy.
He snapped the book shut and looked up at her while she stood staring at him. Hands on her hips.
She couldn't say anything but she could glare.
He seemed to realise that she couldn't say anything and just smirked faintly and looked back at her.
“Yes?” he finally said after nearly a minute.
“Are you reading my mind?” she said.
He smiled broadly.
“And it only took a month for you to realise it,” he said in mock praise. “Although granted, you have been rather busy crying and moping and being afraid of hallways and the sky.”
The nice thing about having no emotions was that Malfoy's nastiness merely felt like pebbles being dropped into a pond. A small, quick splash into her mental imperviousness and then stillness and indifference again.
“How is that possible?” she asked raising a skeptical eyebrow. It defied several fundamental laws of magic.
“Rest assured, Mudblood, I am not reading all of your thoughts. If I had to subject myself to the constant stream of your consciousness I would probably Avada myself. You only register when you're doing something — interesting. And it spares me from having to show up just because you're trying to descend a staircase by yourself.”
Non-drugged Hermione would have flushed angrily at his mockery. But Present Hermione just blinked and considered the information.
So it wasn't a constant thing. That was good to know. But when something registered enough he was somehow able to delve in and read her foremost thoughts. That — was a problem.