To all of you who have waited for years now for this story to be updated: I am sorry. I never really meant for it to be anything more than a one-shot, but I recently discovered that I had - in a fit of utter stupidity - managed not to press the 'completed'-button, so I wrote this chapter as a way of completing the story once and for all. I apologise if this is shorter than you would've wanted, or simply altogether a different kind of ending than what you had expected, but I do hope you enjoy it!

Needless to say this is now severely AU and fairly OOC as well. Furthermore, there is a small lemon there towards the end.

Disclaimer: All characters and events you recognise do not belong to me, but are the property of J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc.

He never touched her. When he came his hands would skim along her body, never touching, the only friction being the sensation of air against her skin as engendered by the movement of his hands. Hermione lay still, her eyes closed, her breath hitched, so tempted to let herself feel something after months of isolation, but too proud and defiant to let the Dark Lord be that person. He didn't speak to her, but hissed softly to Nagini, and let his breath fan against her neck and his robes brush against the back of her legs. It unnerved her, he knew, because it was him and because she still craved it in her loneliness.

He knew exactly what she craved.

She craved the feeling of sun on her skin, the sound of laughter, the texture of paper underneath her fingers. She craved the casual touch of a friend and the challenge of a solvable mystery instead of these repetitive riddles made by a man whose wish and purpose was to make her break herself. And because she was stronger than that, she'd never ask. Never beg. Never break.

He came and went as he pleased, sometimes simply watching her, sometimes standing behind her and inhaling the scent of her hair, sometimes laughing his high-pitched laugh at the sight of her glaring at him. Lord Voldemort brought her books, works written by intelligent authors and she couldn't help but read them, and when he made her talk about them, she couldn't help but enjoy the discussion. They were books on the Dark Arts, of course, but she wouldn't have expected anything else, and she didn't care so long as she could satisfy part of her hunger for knowledge.

When he suddenly kissed her she was devoid of reaction, her mind drawing up a blank and her thoughts running comically like a broken record – he kissed me, is he kissing me?, Lord Voldemort is kissing me? Her eyes flew open in belated surprise and found his red eyes focussed on her, split pupils just slightly dilated, and it all made her gasp a little, because it could not be real … but it was, and he took her open mouth as an invitation to stake claim on every corner of her mouth, his tongue twisting, grinding, massaging. He leant over and they lay down on the bed, and she couldn't decide whether he was unexpectedly heavy or light, and whether it was normal to kiss with open eyes. She knew what was coming, of course, and she didn't push him away – that would only have made him laugh that awful laugh, she knows. Instead, she focussed on trying to enjoy this so that when he eventually invaded her body with his coldness it didn't hurt – nor did it really hurt when, in the aftermath, he leant down and whispered that Harry saw that, and how does she think Harry feels now?

When he returned she asked him why her room was in the shape of a crescent and he said that 'there is no good and evil, there is only power' – and she knew instinctively what he meant. A feeling of something foreign bubbled up in her and her eyes hardened, longing for that power. Taking his cold and serpentine face in her hands, she pushed him backwards until his back was flush with the wall and then she forces her mouth onto his and her tongue into his mouth. He let her take control, let her rip his clothes off him and make him inhale sharply at the feel of teeth on his neck and nipples and a warm hand around his cock. He didn't protest when she pushed him the ground and rode him to the sound of Nagini's hissing. And when she collapsed on top of him in a heap of orgasm and guilt, he wrapped his arms around her in a parody of an embrace and held her thus until sleep overtook her.

The following night he let her go.

He watched her through Harry Potter's eyes and felt a rush of pleasure at her every nightmare and strangled breath in the night, so loud in their tent. But it was not until a month later that he noticed the repetitiveness of the images he spied through Harry's eyes, and at this revelation he felt the boy push into his mind something foreign and unwelcome. He felt it rise through his body from his stomach, tear through his heart with savage brutality, up his throat and making his breath hitch and his tear ducts burn. Surely his heart was being ripped apart and carved out of his chest; surely his breath was being stolen by some mysterious thing mere moments before he could inhale, exhale. He clutched his chest with spidery fingers and breathed through the pain, turning around slowly until he was met by sad and green green eyes.

'So this it how it feels,' he whispered, and green seemed to stretch out from the eyes, reflecting all around him like lightning and snatching his heart and breath away with finality. His body twisted and fell to the ground, collapsing in the shape of a crescent.

A tear fell out of Harry Potter's green eyes and Hermione Granger wrapped her arms around him in comfort. 'I'm sorry,' she croaked; and for whom, she didn't know .