Disclaimer: Very loose sequel to Crucio, which is mine, but the Harry Potter universe certainly isn't.

Posted: 10/16/14

Words: 1,915

Imperio

He was dead.

Hermione tripped into her arm chair, a short note grasped loosely in her right hand. The owl that had delivered it, an unfamiliar one apparently sent by McGonagall to give her the news, cocked its head to the side and watched her. Shock kept her tears from rising; she raised the paper to read it again.

Hermione,

Severus was found dead this morning. They left his body on the steps of WWW. You know his responsibilities—Hogwarts is no longer safe. Meet me in the prearranged location.

Yours,

Minerva

She knew, of course, what McGonagall meant by "responsibilities"—without Flitwick and Dumbledore, Severus had been the only person with the skill required to maintain the wards on the old castle. She spared a half-hearted glance around her office. It didn't look any different.

Unnoticed, the owl fluttered to the other side of the room, behind Hermione's armchair and out of her view.

Hermione tried to organize her thoughts into some form of coherence. Severus was dead. What does that mean for the Order? She wondered, trying to be objective. Something she could have identified as dread gathered in the pit of her stomach. No spy. No leader. No one with the skill to even ward Hogwarts.

On a level of thought below conscious, her thoughts continued, No one to hold me. No one to love—.

"Me," she said suddenly, under her breath. "I'm the only one with the power and skill for that. Which makes me—"

"—our highest priority," finished an unfamiliar voice. Hermione started; the letter fell from nerveless fingers as she-slowly, far too slowly, Severus would have been disappointed-reached for her wand. "Imperio!"

The letter settled gently on the ground; Hermione sat listless in her armchair. Behind her stood a dark figure, one hand resting on the back of the chair, the other holding a wand toward her head in the manner of a puppet master.

"Now let's see the mudblood dance," said the shadow quietly. Hermione blinked slowly; intelligence seemed to reappear in her eyes. She stood gracefully from the chair and walked across the room, retrieving her wand as she went. The shadow stood still behind the chair as she turned back towards it. "What are you going to do now, pet?"

Hermione blinked again a few times and seemed to struggle slightly. The figure furrowed its brows slightly and she answered him, "I'm going to kill Ginny."

The figure smiled and they disappeared.

The letter lay still on the floor.

"Ginny?" Ron called as he stepped into the house.

Behind him, Harry glanced back towards Hermione, saying quietly, "The door was open." Hermione's already drawn face seemed to close even more and she took in a deep breath. "That's not a good sign."

"Ginny?!" Ron called again, moving forward. Harry and Hermione stepped carefully after him, followed by an unseen figure moving easily in Hermione's wake. As they moved through the hall, she caught a glimpse of a moving picture: one of the few pictures in which she stood next to Severus. Neither smiled, but Hermione was tucked carefully under his arm, her face turned halfway to his chest, and occasionally he would glanced down at her head, eyes softening in a way that most people wouldn't have noticed. For an imperceptible moment that seemed to last forever, Hermione paused in the hall, staring at the picture.

The figure hovering behind her frowned. Ron let out a shout.

"Ron!" Harry leapt forward. Hermione, once again under full control, followed him.

The entered the kitchen to the sound of Ron's retching. Hermione ran to him without taking in the rest of the kitchen; Harry stopped moving, staring to their left.

It wasn't messy; that would have given it away. Far away, inside herself, Hermione felt stirrings of grief and overwhelming, crushing guilt. Something deep within broke irreparably.

"Who did this?" It seemed Ron had recovered. He shook off Hermione's arm; even if she could have, she wouldn't have taken it personally. "WHO DID THIS?"

Harry's hand shook as he reached out to a sheet of paper lying on the kitchen counter.

"Dear Mum, Dad, Ron, Harry, George, Charlie, Bill, Percy, and everyone else," he began reading. Hermione's true self hung its' metaphysical head in shame and did not allow any disappointment about not being on the list.

"I lost the baby."

Hermione stopped listening. As much as she could, at least. She hadn't known there was a baby until she was midway through her task, until she had made Ginny write this letter, using powerful coercion spells with questionably Dark origins.

Not the Imperius, which would have given more complete control. Not the Imperius, because it required will to work, and although her captor's will was stronger than hers, it was not by much; the figure could not hope to keep both Hermione and Ginny under the spell at the same time.

Hermione found comfort in retreating to these tangential thoughts. It helped her pretend that this was one long nightmare. She would wake, and Severus would be stumbling back into their quarters, and she would give him ten minutes to collect himself in private before she stopped pretending to be asleep—

They were at the Burrow. It was risky—the wards weren't what they had been—but Molly had decided it was worth the risk to bury her only daughter on the family land where she belonged.

"She should be home," she'd said, her face weather-beaten iron even as tears streamed down her cheeks.

In a turn of events that surprised nobody, least of all Hermione, Ron had turned to his best female friend for comfort. She let him; her captor allowed her to let him—or perhaps it was the other way around. Even when they were in bed together, she wasn't sure how much of her words were her own.

A week after the burial, she wasn't sure if the words had come from her or from her puppet master.

"I love you."

The picture was all that comforted her anymore. She kept a mental picture of it locked away deep within her mind, in the dark places where the intruder couldn't see. She remembered taking it, remembered his embarrassment at having their obvious affection documented for all to see.

Her face, smiling self-consciously as she turned into his chest. His arms, tightening around her in equal parts discomfort and happiness. The way he kissed the top of her head after the picture had been taken. Their laughter as they walked through the castle, joking about how silly and insecure they were. The laughter turning into deeper happiness and fulfillment, later, in private.

No one ever said it out loud, but it was everywhere in their looks that Hermione's friends preferred Ron over Snape. Molly especially overtly supported their relationship, and though she would never speak ill of the dead, it sometimes seemed that she could hardly avoid making an unfavorable comparison.

Hermione smiled and nodded along and down in her subconscious she screamed.

The next death was almost expected: Alastor Moody, finally caught unawares by one of his former arrestees. There were too many suspects for a realistic investigation, although they tried admirably. Hermione sneered inwardly at their efforts.

She never saw Him. She'd begun to think of her captor as a Him, though she had no idea who He was. Perhaps it was because the majority of Voldemort's Death Eaters were male, especially those with power. (Especially after the death of Bellatrix Lestrange at the hands of Molly Weasley.)

He was often physically present with her, she knew. How, she wasn't sure—neither she nor anyone else every saw Him—but she knew He was there.

It was getting more difficult to tell when the curse was weak; it happened in phases, she knew, and she knew that just before she fell asleep and just when she woke up it was weakest, because that was the only time she could feel real tears slip down her cheeks. (Ron thought they were nightmares.)

He left her day-to-day functions up to her, with the general blanket of direction preventing her from speaking or acting as if anything were wrong. She wasn't sure if she should be thankful for that and settled on a sort of dull numbness.

The next deaths did not occur by her hand, but they could certainly be laid on her shoulders.

Death Eaters had gotten through the wards at Hogwarts. Minerva and Harry and Ron and everyone else who mattered reassured her that it was not her fault, that even Albus had needed help to keep up the wards for any length of time, that she could not have done anything to stop it.

Hermione knew better. Knew that she should have been able to hold for another three months at least, should have known about any breach early enough to evacuate the students. She knew that the Death Eaters had been keyed into the wards because she'd done it. She'd given them access.

Her tears had all the more realism for it.

She had been under the Imperius for almost a year; she still had no clue as to the identity of her captor. It seemed she always had a headache nowadays; whether it was due to her curse, she didn't know, but she began every day with a dose of Advil, keeping the bottle next to her bed with a glass of water.

Mornings were the hardest. She could usually feel the truth struggling against the tip of her tongue when Ron kissed her good morning; could feel it trying to escape her mouth as she took her daily Advil; could taste it go back down her throat with her water.

It tasted like bile.

The idea occurred to her as she was asleep. She knew He didn't monitor her at all during dreams, and hadn't in a while—her subconscious controlled the mindscape there, and it did not find His presence welcome.

When she woke, she reached immediately for her Advil, an action that prompted no extra attention from her captor. Moving quickly, serenely, peacefully, she dumped a large handful into her palm and swallowed it with a gulp of water. She sometimes took a larger dose than recommended, so this also prompted little extra attention. She took another handful. The imperius shifted in her mind; it sounded like rattling chains. She smiled and took the last large handful, finishing off three-quarters of a large bottle.

Her glass of water was empty. With her last vestige of self-control, she lifted her wand to her temple and pulled out a few silvery threads. They landed in the glass. He did not seem to notice the action, distracted as He was by the increasing disorder in her mind.

Her captor appeared abruptly in the room just as Hermione began to go into seizures.

Hermione found the shock on His face amusing, and managed, through the shakes, a single rude hand gesture.

Voldemort stared down at one of only two muggleborns who had ever managed to best him, and the shock faded into annoyance.

She had been a valuable tool. It would be inconvenient to replace her.

Weasley's footsteps outside the door warned him and he disappeared.

Usually I have a song in mind when I write something, but I found that this is better read in silence. Not a comfortable small silence, but a big open one—the kind you get when you're sitting in a dark cathedral, or stepping into the basement at night. A silence that's full of secrets.