There were so many things about Malfoy that felt incomprehensible. His power. The point of his ambition. His ironic talent for healing. His apparating ability.
A ritual intended as a punishment...
Hermione turned over the mystery in her mind.
It was probably what Voldemort had been referencing to when he'd spoken of Malfoy deeply disappointing him. Hermione wondered what on earth it could be. Dark magic rituals were generally physically corrosive and mentally eroding. Malfoy seemed suspiciously, even unnaturally, intact.
In fact, as she thought about it further, Malfoy was impossibly sane.
With the quantity of Dark Magic he was exposed to, both through his own use and Voldemort's, he should be poisoned by it. Unless he was spending all his time undergoing purification rituals, his relative health seemed impossible.
Hermione had been ill just from entering Voldemort's Hall, while Malfoy had seemed entirely indifferent to it; and he surely went there multiple times a week. People didn't become indifferent to Dark Magic. It was like a poisonous drug. Addictive. Effecting.
Deadly.
Dark Wizards tended to use more and more, and stronger and stronger types of dark arts until they eroded themselves away the way Voldemort was, or went mad the way Lucius and Bellatrix had.
But Malfoy was intact. Physically and mentally he was — pristine.
And capable of apparating across an entire continent.
How on earth was that possible?
Hermione kept turning the question over and over until she finally gave up. She had too little information to enable any guesses.
She moved on to a different problem.
She couldn't figure out how she fit in. Whatever Malfoy's scheme was, it seemed like she must be somehow included in it. Malfoy was too devoted to her care and maintenance for it to be otherwise. Hermione had thought it was simply because he was doing as ordered, but she was beginning to strongly suspect his attention went beyond that. He seemed personally and emotionally invested in her. The way he stared at her; the undivided intensity of it was almost undeniable. She was significant to him or to his plans.
Where did not getting Hermione pregnant fit into the strategy?
He hated raping her; didn't appear to enjoy it at all and didn't try to. It made him ill. So, wouldn't he want her pregnant as soon as possible?
Unless it had to do with her memories. The idea that a pregnancy would unlock the memories was theoretical at best. But if Malfoy suspected there were something in her memory that he didn't want unlocked... that could possibly explain it.
But even without a pregnancy, the memories were slowly beginning to re-emerge.
If she were pregnant, it would buy him nine months of exclusive access to them. So long as she was not pregnant, arbitrary memories might emerge for Voldemort to find.
Why would he keep forcing them both through five days of monthly trauma?
Hermione couldn't account for it.
She mulled over the question again.
The only additional element she could think of was that Malfoy had to know she would rather die than get pregnant.
Would that matter to him?
She kept wondering until she fell asleep.
She was anxious all the next day; on edge and fidgeting until she started fearing she'd start picking her skin off. She barely skimmed the Daily Prophet before she began tearing it to pieces and folding it into every shape she could think of. She couldn't fold cranes, but she could fold aeroplanes and all sorts of other geometric shapes. She poured her nervous energy into folding until her fingertips felt raw.
She started walking through the North Wing, trailing her fingers lightly along the walls as she went.
When evening came, Hermione took a bath without instruction. Topsy did not appear but dinner did. Hermione ignored it. It was nearly nine when the House-elf suddenly popped into the room.
Topsy averted her eyes as Hermione stared down at her.
"The master is back. You is to get ready."
There was a pause.
"I'm already ready," Hermione said.
Topsy nodded and then disappeared.
Hermione went and sat at the foot of her bed.
When Malfoy appeared at the door they stared across the room at each other for several minutes.
There was nothing to say.
He walked across the room and withdrew a vial of Calming Draught which he handed to her without a word. She swallowed the contents, and then handed it back.
While he was taking his own potion, Hermione slid back on the mattress and laid down, staring determinedly up at the canopy over her bed.
She didn't flinch when she felt the bed shift. She didn't make a sound when she felt him shift her robes aside and expose her. When she felt him move between her legs, she bit her lip as she continued to stare up at the canopy. When he muttered the lubrication charm she balled her hand into fists.
When he entered her, she gave a small gasp and turned her face toward the wall in despair, writhing with internal anguish.
Her body had anticipated it. Attuned and waiting. It was ready. Wanting.
It was such a profound betrayal.
Knowing her arousal was physiologically natural didn't ease the guilt.
When the rape was clinical it was endurable. When the rape was drugged it was endurable. But when it was just her, her own mind and physiology, it was the worst of all. It twisted and tore at something inside her.
I'm being raped and my body is enjoying it, she thought bitterly and wanted to curl away.
She thought she might just vomit.
She didn't want to know if Malfoy could tell the difference. Whether he knew.
She stared at the wall and tried not to make another sound. When he came, he immediately removed himself, jerked her robes down, snatched up his robes, and apparated.
She didn't turn to see what he looked like before he vanished. She just pulled her legs closed and lay there. She could feel her tears leaving cold trails along her temples.
The next two days were the same.
There was little sense of relief the morning after the fifth day. Hermione just felt cold.
Her room and bed had lost all sense of comfort to her.
She pulled a fresh set of robes from the wardrobe and went down the hall to the bathroom with the shower. Then she curled up into a tight ball, seated on the floor of the shower and stayed there under the water.
There was no point in denying it. Things had shifted. Nothing felt the same. Not any longer.
The potion was a significant factor but Hermione couldn't deny the array of other elements.
Malfoy was not the monster she had initially perceived him as being. After learning what was happening to the other surrogates; after what Montague had tried to do to her; after Astoria; after becoming terrified of what cruelty Lucius Malfoy would devise if her surrogacy were transferred. The person she perceived Malfoy as being had shifted.
Being 'saved' by him had affected things.
He touched her. No one had touched her in so long.
He'd healed her, far more than he needed to.
He didn't even want to rape her.
Though he insisted his protection of her was entirely borne from from self-interest — because he'd been commanded to — she was almost certain he was far exceeding what obligation demanded.
The influence of the manacles also contributed to it. They'd always been intended to cultivate compliance and dependence. To remove her ability to resist.
If she could resist Malfoy's violation; if he were physically forcing her down as he raped her, it would be easier for her to stop growing resigned and accustomed to it. It was the lying quietly and experiencing it. The anticipation of an inevitability that she had no ability to resist.
If the ways he hurt her were more voluntary and less obligatory, it would be easier to see him for who he was.