Chapter Text
Her head breaks the water’s surface, and she gasps, greedily filling air into her lungs. She opens her eyes, her vision blurry and takes in the room. Grey, mouldy stone walls, one worn stool in the corner of the room and – The hand on the back of her head presses her face back down into the icy water, the lack of oxygen soon burning her lungs. She thrashes her arms and tries to kick behind her, but her hands are being detained, and she quickly feels her strength wane out as her blood starts to sluggishly move through her body.
She really shouldn’t fight back. She knows it will only make her run out of oxygen that much faster as her body exerts itself, but she cannot help it; it’s pure instinct. Her entire body starts to tingle, and she knows if she doesn’t breathe fresh air soon, she will drown in this water. Her head is pulled back up again, a hand tugging mercilessly on her hair, causing some of her roots to disconnect from her scalp from the force. She sputters and coughs, her lungs expanding and pulling together in rapid succession with the desperate breaths she is automatically taking. She feels as though she is burning from the inside out, starting from her lungs. As the pressure on the back of her head increases slowly again, she thrashes once more. They are laughing at her, deliberately drawing the moment she connects with the water out to make her suffer as they watch her panicking more and more. She knows she can´t take it much longer; her brain cells will abandon her if the men keep this up. They won't let her die; she knows this, she is far too important for that. But they might make it long enough for there to be permanent damage. The one weapon she truly has at her disposal, her brain, taken away from her.
Right before she meets the cold water again, she faintly hears a bored voice through the blood rushing in her ears drawl, "That's quite enough for now.”
The heavy hand pressing her downwards instantly leaves the back of her head, and she pushes herself back up using the rim of the basin. Her muscles tremble, and she can only push herself up a couple of centimetres, her hands still shackled to the rim, before she almost collapses back into the water again. She tries to gather herself to assess whether the voice that saved her really belongs to the person she thinks or if her mind is playing tricks on her now.
She attempts to turn her head but can’t reach back far enough to look directly behind her from where the voice came.
“Of course, sir,” says one of the men to her right and the other two mumble something similar under their breath nervously. They are obedient to his man, and if she thinks too much about why this might be, her body locks up. It’s never a good sign when men fond of torture are reverent before another man. She hears footsteps, slow but sure, almost leisurely coming towards her, but halting a few paces away from her. She tries to look over her shoulders again, turning this way and that, but can only make out a hooded figure, large and ominous, standing behind her. Her vision is further obscured by the wet strands of hair hanging into her eyes.
“Hmm,” hums the faceless voice, “do you think we should free her of her binds then?”
“No, sir. That would be a waste, we were just starting to have fun with her,” laughs the man who had been pressing her down before.
“Please,” she whispers, her arms trembling severely. She can´t hold herself up much longer, and if her arms collapse, she will be at fault for her own death.
“Cut her loose,” demands the voice, now slicing coldly through the room.
The other men scramble to get her binds off from her mutilated wrists, where they were cutting into her flesh. She gathers her arms closer to her side, following the rim of the basin and finally pushes herself up further, straightening her aching back. She cradles them before her chest, seeking some semblance of comfort and warmth. She feels the man take three more steps towards her back, now standing so close, she can feel the heat of him radiate towards her frozen body.
“How have you gotten yourself into this mess, little bunny?” he whispers lowly, his breath fanning her neck. She shudders and feels utterly exposed, vulnerable. She doesn´t answer, her voice stuck in her throat.
“I asked you a question,” he suddenly bellows, and she flinches back from the voice, ringing in her ears due to the volume.
“I – I – I don't kn-know,” she stutters, her lips trembling from the cold and the fear running through her.
He clicks his tongue before answering gravely, sounding oddly disappointed, “Yes, you do. Has mummy never told you not to visit the fox's den?”
The other men laugh at that as though he had made the funniest joke of the century. She can only remain stock still, once again not answering him while simultaneously fearing the repercussions. God, she hates that she can´t see his face, cannot even remotely guess at what he might do next. It is almost worse than being pushed into the icy water repeatedly. As the silence stretches on, her panic increases. She can feel him directly behind her, but she cannot even hear him breathe. He is utterly silent. She has started shivering in the meantime, trembling from both the cold and the exhaustion.
“Merlin, you’re pathetic,” he finally scoffs.
A bolt goes through her because no, her mind had not played any tricks on her, this is his voice. She is transported back to her eleven-year-old self at the sound, standing in the courtyard at Hogwarts while he throws slurs at her. Tears well up in her eyes, and not because of the pressure in her head due to lack of oxygen this time, but real, emotionally induced tears. She feels as though she can watch her heart being squeezed under the heavy boot of the man behind her. She swallows the lump in her throat and tries not to make a single sound. She does not move, hardly even breathes. This must be a dream, surely. Because how can this be happening, how is this her life?
“Take her to her cell. Someone will look at her later, or she will rot there; either way is fine,” she hears him say.
If it weren't for the familiarity of the scoff, she would not have thought it to be him. His voice sounds so different from how she remembers it. Cold and extremely distanced, uncaring, calculating. She still hasn´t seen him and takes one last desperate glance over her shoulder, only to see that he has already turned around and is striving towards the door. She did not even hear the swish of his robes. She turns back around and only just hears the click of the door behind him before the other men grab both of her arms roughly and yank on either side. She yells out at the sudden ripping sensation going through her arms, her shoulders, her neck. The men cackle, and one of them lets her go so the other can push her around her own axis, now facing the door. They give her a hard shove between her shoulder blades, so she stumbles forward, rowing with her throbbing arms for balance to catch her fall. She is scarcely standing again when they grab her anew and kick her in the back of her knees so that her legs cave in and she hangs between them by their grip. Her arms scream at her in pain, and she scrambles quickly back to full standing.
She briefly thinks about fighting the men directly with her bare fists, considering that they have not bothered cuffing her again, but even though she is not the worst in hand-to-hand combat, she is still outnumbered, let alone way less muscly than they are. Add to that her already weakened state from the repeated drowning simulation, and there remains not a single chance of her beating these men. They finally stop jostling her around and simply drag her by her feet towards the dungeons now. She almost feels relieved when they put her back into the cell, she has been spending her last three days in. She wants to weep at that, at being glad to be locked up, a prisoner. But at least no one has tried to harm her in her cell yet. It´s only when she is taken out that she has to bear all kinds of torture. She looks down at her mangled hands, the fingernails of her left hand all missing after the previous day.
Her mind slowly starts going over the events of the past hour, being dunked again and again into the freezing water until her face was completely numb and her lungs were screaming at her. It wasn’t worse than yesterday, though, so she is grateful for that. Still, how much longer would they have gone on if he hadn’t stopped them? Had he saved her from death or at least mental decline, as her brain cells would have died off one after the other due to lack of oxygen? Her mind is whirling. What was he doing here? Had he recognised her? Would he come back? God, she had thought he was dead or in another country by now; she had not heard from him in over five years.
Maybe five years were enough to forget a person? It seemed that it was enough for him to forget her. As her thoughts kept spinning in her brain, she crawled to the right-hand corner of her cell, lying down on the cold floor covered in straw to find some comfort for her aching limbs. God, she was thirsty. Bit ironic considering she had just spent the better part of an hour with her head under water, but she had been too preoccupied with surviving to think about trying to drink. She hadn't had any water since yesterday and felt wholly parched. She was hungry too, her stomach squeezing in on itself since they had not given her food once since she arrived. She feels weak and lightheaded, and she hates it. There is a strong stench in the dungeons of unwashed bodies and – she shivers at the thought – rotting flesh; he was probably right, and they would just let her rot down here. The thought made her even more determined than before not to give them any information; she would no longer be useful if she revealed anything to them, and they would surely kill her right after. The smell makes her even more nauseous than she already is, but nonetheless, she's at the point where she could eat anything, even moss off the wall if there was any. She curls in on herself and whimpers. She hopes the Order will find her soon and get her out. As she drifts off to sleep from exhaustion, she thinks about her parents and about them promenading on a beach in Australia. She pictures the sand under their feet and the sound of waves crashing against the shore. She cranes her neck a little, imagining the sun hitting her face and warming her chilled bones.