If the boots had been given to her earlier she might have felt hopeful about using them to escape. But as she looked down at her feet she didn't feel even the faintest flicker of optimism.
Although it would be nice not to have her feet ache for hours each day.
The things she found herself being grateful for were truly horrifying.
The house elf appeared again to take away her dishes and asked if she wanted anything.
“Am I allowed to keep the newspapers after I've read them?” Hermione asked cautiously.
The question was apparently not one the elf had been prepared to answer. It shuffled its feet and seemed to be considering.
“Topsy thinks so. It will just be being banished after,” the elf said after several minutes. “Why is the Mudblood wanting them?”
Hermione shrugged.
“There's nothing to do. Having paper I could use would be nice. I'm guessing that I'll be refused if I ask for a ball of string or yarn.”
The elf nodded that Hermione's guess was accurate.
“Topsy is to keep this room clean. But the Mudblood can be using the paper until the next paper is coming,” the elf said.
“Fair enough,” Hermione said in agreement. Not that she had any choice in the matter.
Hermione read the day's newspaper twelve times before tearing it into neat squares. She had spent the previous night going through a list of things she thought she might be permitted to have. She had assumed that she couldn't have knitting needles. Being restricted from yarn had been a guess, although where Malfoy worried she'd hang herself without a portrait catching her seemed questionable—
Maybe outside. She'd have to look more carefully at the trees on the estate… She brushed aside such schemes to save for a later date.
She wasn't thinking about suicide. She wasn't thinking about the way her head still throbbed; as though Voldemort had done permanent damage to her mind. She wasn't thinking about how sounds hurt. Or how her hands had started spasming because of the clock again. Or that the way Voldemort had forced her to re-live being raped had felt even more traumatic than the times when it happened. She wasn't thinking about how she was never going to escape.
She wasn't thinking about anything but carefully ripping up The Daily Prophet as steadily as her spasming fingers would allow her to.
That was all.
It was the only thing she was thinking about.
When she had made several perfect squares she set to folding them. She started with origami cranes.
She couldn't remember exactly where she had learned to make them. The ability felt like muscle memory, creating the precise creases in a specific order that she didn't recall memorizing.
Her father? Maybe?
Someone with agile, precise fingers. At a kitchen table guiding her through the steps.
“If you fold a thousand cranes in one year, you'll get a wish,” a male voice said.
“No, you get good luck and happiness,” came a woman's voice from the next room.
“Same thing.”
“Not really. A wish assumes a person knows what's best for them. Good luck and happiness leaves it to Fate to lead you to the right place. I'd much prefer to be gifted with good luck and happiness than a single wish.”
“Ok, Confucius. I'll defer to your superior understanding of the mystic.”
“Now you're purposely trying to provoke me. Conflating Confucianism and Japanese Mythology is an offense before the gods of pedagogy. I will not let you fill our daughter's head with such misinformation.”
“Maybe I'm doing it to encourage her critical thinking…. Fine, I sincerely apologise for how horribly miseducated she'll be now. I will accept full responsibility when it causes her to be cast from civil society and forced to wander the earth as a nomad. In the future I'll be sure to cross-reference everything I say at the library first.”
“ Yes, thank you. That would be great.”
“The trouble with marrying someone who never bores you is that they don't even leave a man in peace to teach his daughter his favourite hobby. Here, I'll show you how to make origami tessellations. You mother doesn't know a thing about those. I just read a paper by an astrophysicist who proposes using the technique to store large membranes on satellites.”
Hermione folded origami cranes until her fingertips felt raw. Then she arranged them on the floor so they would stand, wings extended.
The newspaper was not an ideal strength for origami but it was something to do. Hermione hadn't had anything to do in so long.
It was too bad that Japanese mythology wasn't actually real magic. She'd fold a hundred thousand cranes if it would give her a bit of luck.
She gathered the cranes up and flattened them all. Leaving them in a neat pile for the elves to banish.
She wondered what her parents had been like. What kinds of jobs they had.
She hoped that her inability to remember them meant that they were safe somewhere. That she had protected them before the war started.
She hoped they didn't know what had become of her.
Chapter End Notes
A thousand paper cranes by Flyora.
Hermione with a paper crane by lyrium_mysterium.
Hermione's cranes by thegirlthatreadsfantasybooks.
Hermione with her crane by silicea.art.
Chapter 13
Five days later Hermione was seated on the floor by the window folding what was, by her count, her two hundred and thirty-sixth paper crane when the door opened and a young man peered through. His eyes swept across the room and when they landed on Hermione he entered the room and quickly closed the door behind himself.
His expression was shifty and he stared at her intently as he came forward.
He seemed hurried.
He was solidly built with dark hair and an angular face. He was wearing formal, dark blue dress robes. He had thick stubble across his face.
Hermione's instinctive response at the sight of him was utter terror.
She froze as though petrified and stared.
There was nowhere to run. She couldn't even scream.
It hadn't ever occurred to her that a stranger might just walk into her room one day.
He paused slightly as he approached, noting her expression.
“You don't remember me,” he said in a tone of surprise. There seemed to be a hint of offense in the words.
Hermione studied him desperately, trying to guess who he was. He seemed vaguely familiar. Perhaps from school? Someone she hadn't known well.
He kept coming across the room. He was halfway across it and Hermione's hands started spasming as she struggled to think of what to do. If she bolted, she'd have to get out of earshot or he could just order her to stop. Perhaps if she plugged her ears...but he could just stun her.
She couldn't—
He was only a few feet away and his expression was growing triumphant.
Suddenly there was a sharp crack and Malfoy appeared beside her out of thin air. Hermione started and shrank toward him, away from the approaching stranger.
The intense, triumphant expression on the young man's face faded sharply into indifference at the sight of Malfoy. The shiftiness of his posture falling away as he straightened and glanced around Hermione's room.