She sat in her room, the sun streaming through the window onto the brown carpeted floor, creating distinct black bars of shadow. The bars were larger than those that obstructed the light through her window. The ones on the floor were as large as her. She could kill someone with them- if they weighed more than shadow. She could do a lot of things if everything in her life weighed more than shadow.
How much did shadow weigh anyway? Probably as much as her mind
Her white gown was against her skin, tasteless and ugly, even for a uniform. Its texture was non-existent. It just...was...against her skin. It was the same colour as the walls. Everything was. White was meant to be calming and a colour that did not provoke anger. It didn't provoke anything really, just let everything be the way it was.
That was worse.
She couldn't feel the white, nor the contrast her hair, skin or existence made with it. She felt no sense of calmness surround her body-nor enter it.
The white left her to remain tucked within her haze of jumbled thoughts and tangled cobwebs of emotions. It let the summer air turn into airy cool breezes of past misconceptions that flitted between her particles of thought, memory to taunt her gently- each attack burning with a fire as cold as her pain and rage.
"He's coming Hermione," he whispered in her ear as they stood, backs against the wall, "I can feel it." They both continued sliding their backs, trying to merge with the murky diminishing wallpaper.
"We have to get you, Potter and Weasley out of here."
"Where?" she asked, "There's nowhere for us to hide anymore Draco."
"I'll show you."
Her mind, though exhausted couldn't rest.
It stood.
It stood like an open and jagged cliff against the ragingly manic sea of her memories and thoughts; both provoking each other.
"You're making a mistake Hermione!" he said to her sternly, his voice quivering with the emotion and anger that he was holding back, "he's using you to get to Harry! You can't trust him."
She turned and faced him from her position at the window, "Stop talking Ronald!" she said in a quiet voice, "I've heard this a million times already. I trust him and I don't want to listen to your rubbish any longer!"
Her red headed friend let out a soft growl of frustration and took a deliberate step forward.
"Why?" he asked angrily, his teeth gritted, "Why are you being so stupid?"
She narrowed her eyes but kept her composure.
"I'm not being stupid Ronald, you are!" she folded her arms across her chest, "I don't know what the bloody hell your problem is! I trust him because I love him, and because he loves me!"
He grabbed her arms and shook her slightly, his face etched with frustrated desperation for her to see the truth she had closed her eyes to.
"He doesn't love you!" he whispered urgently, pulling her close to him, "he doesn't at all. He works for Voldermort and can never love you!"
She wrenched her arms out of his grasp, her eyes flashing.
"Why?" She demanded, her volume rising as she tried to block out his whisper, "because I'm not a stupid Lavender airhead or a bloody Veela like Fleur? Is that it?"
He stood shocked as her voice reached a peak, unable to understand how or why he had said something so different to what he meant.
"No…I didn't…"
"Well guess what! Draco does love me and I love him because we're not as narrow-minded as you are!"
"He doesn't love you Hermione!" he said softly, "he doesn't care about any of you! He's just lying to you to get to Harry."
"Shut up!" she commanded venomously.
He narrowed his eyes but continued
"You're just buying bullshit because a guy's paying attention to you and you think it's love," his ears were reddening, "well it's not! You're letting your insecurities get in the way! You're being blinded by your..." he stopped and clenched his jaw, not wanting to continue. He unclenched the fists he hadn't even realised to have formed.
"I know because I can see the way he looks at you. He doesn't love you at all!"
Her mind sought ways to extinguish the painful flame of exhaustion that life kept alight. It seemed to lick its way up her cold skin and bones yet was too subtle and small to warm them into rest...or preferably burn them into something more permanent.
It formed a cage around her, only allowing her physical movements of the body. Her mind lashed and threw itself at its caged domain, being subjected further and further to the draining fumes of the fire.
She had stopped seeking any control of her mind. In the few minutes of classified insanity, she experienced light filled, warm, fulfilling existences, in which she could see without the blindfold of her torturous guilt filled memories, hear without the thunderous rage of her thoughts and feel without the wrath of the two combined that enveloped her into a state of a screaming nothingness.
Yet just as man was supposedly condemned to be free, she was condemned to be sane.
She used to fight for it, a time ago. She used to cling to it till she could hear her nails scraping against the slippery surface of her mind.
It wasn't a slippery slope. It was flat ground on which she was continuously slipping and sliding. Yet now that she no longer fought to stay on one side she seemed stuck in the middle, moving in between the two poles of her mind and unable to stay at neither bliss nor torture – exemplifying their effects.
"Hermione," he called, "you come with me first. I'll send a portkey for Potter and Weasley to use and come and join us."
"Why can't we all go together?" she asked as he entered her room, "we have to stick together."
"Do you want to stick with Weasley after all those terrible lies and things he said that day?"
She felt a pang of something defensive for Ron but pushed it away when she felt his arms around her waist from behind.
"It's not about what I want Draco," she said softly, still feeling the pang, "We have to stick together."
"He was awfully inconsiderate of your friendship that he claims to cherish and obviously proved what I said earlier, about him taking you for granted."
She felt his hands run up her waist and she closed her eyes, yielding to the soaring sense that was him.
"You know you'll be safe with me anyway," he continued, his breath against her ear, "I'd never let anyone hurt you, love."
Though she longed for those highs, she had no memory of them. They were dissolved into something that was slowly growing to be everything. If she couldn't even remember them, how could she have been so addicted as to crave them until the killed everything? If she couldn't even remember his smell, how did it manage to cling to everything and nothing? If she couldn't now recall what his hands or mouth or body were like, how did they manage to engulf her to a point where her mind was no longer needed?
If she couldn't remember more than the last cold moments of his chilling, laughing betrayal, how had he managed to hold her heart and squeeze it till it no longer pumped of its own accord?
"My heart beats for you..." that was in a romance song or book of some kind. Or was it "My heart beats because of you..." ?
It didn't matter. Neither were real.
They couldn't understand what else to do besides leave her in anther cage for the safety of the rest. How could they? Could she really be a danger to people?
"You foolish girl!" the high-pitched voice whispered through her screams, "You foolish mudblood! How you let your silly little heart carry you away. The smartest witch of her day is still subject to weaknesses of love. So much so that it is at the demise of all that she has fought for.
It laughed and cast another Cruciatus curse on her.
"You're silly Weasley friend was the ones with brains," it leered, "not you. And you ignored him. You ignored his pleas, his touching love confession. You won't be fortunate enough to ignore his suffering now. One must look upon the fruits of their labour. This is all your doing after all."
Tears sprung to her eyes, but not from the pain, but from the sound of the familiar yet colder version of Draco's laugh. It chilled through the Cruciatus burning of her bones and froze them. She could no longer breathe as both fire and ice seemed choked her every cell, and she felt her soul suffocate within her.
"I will not kill you however, mudblood," the voice continued, "You will do that to yourself when you stare into the dead open eyes of Weasley and know your stupidity!"
They – people - couldn't understand the soulless, dead plains of her mind, where not a single person walked, but nightmares of the past souls and times ran free like vermin in a sewer.
For no one of a classified sane mind could understand something that was beyond the existence of their own.
Only those who had experienced both could try-and then fail miserably.
So she sat in on her bed, in her room and stared at the bars she longed to raise against herself. They refused to move, as did the white all around her. It was supposed to leave her mind to rest and not provoke anything.
And yet as she sat here, in the full sense of the pallid white serenity of her ward, she felt only the searing difference between her physical and psyche hack through every part of her interior, leaving torn residue and gashes.
There were no shards and no shattering. She'd believed it all to be glass for so long, and only now felt the rotting flesh of within disintergrate.
Unknowingly, she began to cross the space between the world of people and one of constant screaming memories, walking calmly across the slippery surface, now not slipping once.
She laughed coldly, "how the hell would you know Ron!" her reverting to his nickname being no kinder, "you don't know anything about love because you're so full of superstitious garbage and just look at the exterior! How would you know anything about whether he's in love with me or not?"
"Because I love you!"
It was without hesitation, without his control that his mouth had run away from him.
The silence seemed to echo and she breathed through it. How long had she wanted him to say it? How long had she wanted him to turn around and say those exact words? She couldn't even remember. And now the words were too wonderfully terrible for her to hear.
She wished she was deaf.
"Because I love you," he whispered again, now breathing through the silence like her, but coming through it towards her.
He grabbed her arms and pulled her to him. "I'm sick in love with you, Hermione! I'm here, Ron, the idiot friend. I'm watching you run off with some smooth talking, lying snake who's just going to hurt you. I'm trying to stop it. I'm trying to make you open your bloody eyes and stop it. But you can't see past the end of your own nose or Malfoy, and see a real person who has loved you since...since...since you had braces in your teeth and..."
He took a breath and pulled her even closer to lowered his voice to a whisper.
"I've loved you with all my heart for so long that I can't even feel anything else sometimes." he leaned in closer, "that's why I know he doesn't love you! Because he doesn't look at you the way I do at all.
He leaned in to her lips but didn't touch her.
"It would be humanly impossible," he whispered, leaning his forehead against hers, "for someone to love you even half as much as I do."
Her breathing was fast as fought desperately against the truth.
Squirming as her whole body screamed where the truth cut through, she wrenched herself out of his grasp.
"Get away from me!"She whispered, backing away. His blue eyes never left hers.
"I…You…I" she couldn't find the words to deny the truth without wanting to kill herself.
She finally reached the doorway.
"I don't love you!" she whispered, her entire mouth stained with lies, "I never have. I love Draco."
And she left. Leaving him behind she headed straight for the web of lies that seemed a whole lot softer at the time.
That one encounter still scorched her skin with an ironic sense of blissful pain as she remembered how desperately she had tried to revive him when they had dragged her to his body.
In his death she still felt his betrayed love shoot at her from every inch of his skin as she sunk beside him, her meaningless tears scarring his skin. She could say nothing, for no words would undo her foolishness. The war had been won yet she till lay over his dead body while Harry's was somewhere else in the forest, at the feet of Draco who had murdered him in a last attempt to avenge his master before the Aurors came to claim both of them.
She had killed both of them through her blindness and it was then that her mind surpassed everything and become a prisoner to its bonds of sanity.
It seemed warmer and calmer on the other side. Maybe she'd find him there. Even if the screaming continued, it was warmer and calmer there, and would be even more so if he was there.
She tasted a tear that had travelled the journey from her large brown iris to her lips and smiled in the only way she knew how as she remembered him.
She felt the exhaustion of her mind reach an almighty peak and slowly transform into a comforting blanket of black, devoid of even the beautiful faces of a red headed freckled blue eyed man and a bespectacled raven haired green eyed friend.
An emptiness so vacant and free she had never known.