The ceiling glowed. Hermione was not sure whether it was just something wrong with her eyes or with the ceiling itself. What she really needed as a comparison was someone else. To check it. To check that she wasn't going crazy in this forced confinement.
It was her bedroom, but that changed nothing. Despite having belonged to her for years, it gave her little comfort now. The walls were ever silent despite how frequently she spoke to them, but now the ceiling glowed.
Hermione often contemplated the sentience of inanimate things. She'd spent months befriending a quill an Auror had left on her desk, now clean and rarely used, where once it had been buried beneath piles and piles of parhcment, comforting in its disorganised state. This room was hers, and yet it no longer belonged to her.
That quill had been Hermione's only companion, but even it had left her in the end. It had grown older and older with each use from the officer's visit, lines growing in its face where there had once been none, its spine bending with the strictures of age.
Then it had left and made the bin its new companion. Hermione had been sad, but not enough to cry. It was only a quill, after all.
Perhaps the ceiling was to be her new companion.
Screaming at the walls that she had long ago named after constellations, the tradition one Hermione had picked up from an old friend, she wished desperately for release.
"Draco! You promised!" her voice cracked on the last, the wall that had become the ceiling as she slumped from her position on the bed, watching as Hercules began to glow. It seemed that it really was just her eyes and not the ceiling itself. Hermione supposed that would be comforting for the ceiling.
Despite all these months of being here, she had yet to name the ceiling. Hermione spent hours of days just staring at it, attempting to escape from the too-silent walls. Somehow naming them had given them a life in her eyes and now she found herself withdrawing from all company, even theirs. They were her best friends, and they could not be taken from her, yet she found herself lonelier in their company than she would otherwise have been.
"And you Gemini, what are you staring at?" she yelled disconsolately at the opposite wall from her beloved Draco. Gemini turned her back on her within the confines of the house, facing whatever room was adjacent to hers. Hermione could no longer find the time or the effort to remember, to care.
Her universe was this room, these walls and the ceiling. All her friends and her family existed in this room, the Aurors mere pilgrims waiting at the altar of her temple.
There was one at the door now, unsure of whether or not to knock.
"Come in," she called out, trying to hold her voice and what remained of her sanity together.
To regain what she lacked; her freedom, she had to put on this act. To be sane, or to be insane, that was the true question. She fervently believed that had been all Hamlet had been about, the murder and the political intrigue merely a distraction from the true issue at the heart of it. Madness.
A/N (the thing where I talk, and people skim over it)
This is basically me exploring Ophelia's character from Hamlet (and her madness) from someone else's perspective, which is where Hermione comes in. Hope you enjoyed. If anyone even reads this.