Trapped
A/n: I don't know why I'm writing this. Or why I've chosen the characters I have. I don't think I've actually ever written anything involving Harry, Ron or Hermione as of yet, but, well, I guess I'm about to. Let me just clear something up. I am neither a H/H shipper, nor an H/R shipper. But I personally think Hermione and Ron are more believable as a couple than Hermione and Harry. Which would be the reason that Ron is the particular guy involved. This isn't a romance fic though. This is a way for me to vent some serious depression so maybe I can stop dreaming about jumping off cliffs or drowning (my dreams disturb me) Please review, and try and enjoy the morbid thoughts swimming around my head.
It was cold. It was always cold. There was a draft coming from outside her cell and there was nothing she could do about it. A solitary candle was flickering in the corner of the cell as it had been all day. It was her only source of light. If it died, she would be in total darkness. Not that it mattered. Nothing was going to go away.
She could see it even better in the dark, image after image playing over in her mind relentlessly. And the screaming. The screaming never stopped. It was worse in the dark though. When the candle was burning brightly she could stare at that. Or at the floor. If she screwed up her eyes and counted all the tiles individually she could almost block out the screaming. But in the dark, there was nothing to concentrate on. She had to listen to it.
Not all the screams were in her head though. All around her were cells identical to the one she now spent her days in. The people in them were insane. She was insane. At least, that's what everybody told her. 'You don't come here if you're not insane' they had said. And after a while, she had admitted that she probably was.
Nobody forced to listen to the voices she heard in her head day after day could possibly avoid insanity. Sometimes she screamed too, when it was all too much. When the screams got to loud, when the images became sharper. That was when it hurt the most.
The pain was unbearable; nobody could withstand that sort of pain. When this happened, when there was no way to shut it out, she would curl up into a tiny ball and hold her head in her hands. And she would sob until she was exhausted. Sometimes that helped. Most of the time it made everything seem even worse. That was when she would scream. These where her darkest hours.
Not that any hours were anything that could resemble 'light'. Everyday she faced the same torture. She was fed only when her captors saw fit to feed her. She slept on a stone floor, with rats and mice at her feet. The smells that came from every corner of the damp cell turned her stomach and made her want to retch. And this was how it was going to be forever. Until she died.
Because she wasn't going to be freed. She wasn't going to serve a sentence and be released back into the world. And there wasn't any chance of rescue. She was a prisoner of war and the dementors swarming through the corridors around her cell would rather see her dead than rescued.
And even if anybody did try to rescue her, how could they? No one knew where she was. She didn't know where she was. All she knew was that the place bore a similarity to the way she had always pictured Azkaban, yet she wasn't there.
She was just in a cell. And would be until the vile creatures that surrounded her day and night had driven every happy memory, every positive thought from her mind and she died of insanity. Well they were doing a good job. She had almost forgotten what it felt like to be happy. And whenever she tried to remember, the screaming started again. So she stopped trying to be happy, because it always made her more depressed.
But then, anyone who had seen what she had seen would be completely forgiven for refusing to draw breath, if only the escape the mental agony she was forced through when recalling the horror she had witnessed.
One minute, everything had been fine. The next, her whole life had been in turmoil. She remembered everything graphically, would never be allowed to forget.
She had been in the Gryffindor common room writing a Transfiguration paper when it had happened. She was in her seventh year, would have been leaving soon. She recalled that Harry and Ron had been in the room too, having a blazing row over a game of Exploding Snap. She remembered tutting at them and ignoring them good-naturedly. There was no point joining in the argument, she was in a good mood, and what was the point in spoiling it?
At that point, everything in her life had been beginning to make sense. She had time for schoolwork, though had been persuaded to stop camping out in the library. She had friends, and friends who cared very much for her. And she had Ron.
Even she had been unsure how that had happened. It just had. In the middle of their fifth year at Hogwarts. And they had never looked back since.
She had been contemplating all this as she read through her notes. She could remember vividly feeling happier that she had ever done, yet, whilst lying in her cell, she couldn't summon forward the needed courage to try and remember just how feeling so ecstatic had felt.
And then, without a word of warning, or a sound of alarm, the entire tower had started to fall. She could see herself in her minds eye, see everything exactly as it had happened. She remembered, upon first instinct, grabbing at her Transfiguration book, in a bid to protect it.
It hadn't worked. Within a few seconds, the tower had fallen, and picking her way out of the rubble, she remembered feeling her entire stomach drop to a place she hadn't realised it could before. For there, surrounding the entire school, was a legion of wizards and witches, dressed from head to toe in black.
In the air, the Dark Mark hung prominently. There were huge dragons swarming around overhead. And there were dementors and death eaters everywhere. And not a single person had heard their coming.
All around her, parts of the school were falling, caused by various dark curses being thrown at them. There were thousands of them. Every second more witches and wizards were arriving and, even if the outside wizarding world got wind of what was happening, by the time they had arrived, she knew that it would be too late.
She then remembered being grabbed roughly from behind, and having something pulled over her head. She had started to scream, but a hand had clamped itself firmly over her mouth.
"Shhh," a voice had hissed. "It's only me, come on." It had taken her a moment to realise where she was. She was underneath Harry's invisibility cloak, with Ron.
"Where's Harry?" she had croaked.
"I dunno, come on, we've got to find him." It hadn't taken them long. Despite the thousands of black figures cluttering the grounds of Hogwarts, it wasn't hard to guess where Harry was.
There was a large ring of what looked to be Death Eaters, and the most hideous of screams were coming from the middle of the ring. They had pushed forwards, until they could see, and there was Harry.
He had sunken to his knees and his face was white and damp. The savages surrounding him were torturing him, cursing him, jeering at him. And then there had been a voice.
The voice had been so terrible, so blood curdling, that Hermione felt as if she were the one being tortured when the words reached her ears.
"Move away." The high voice had said. "I will deal with this one." And there, plain as day, had stood Lord Voldemort. She remembered feeling Ron stiffen and become ice cold beside her, and Harry, still on his knees, looking like a deer caught in a cars headlights.
The look on his face had been so resigned then. His wand had been snapped, it looked as if one of his legs were broken. In the matter of a second, he appeared to have accepted his death.
The hideous being had shrieked gleefully, and raised it's wand. Words had left his lips, but they were drowned out by the tortured screams coming from everywhere around her. And then, without warning, the cloak was gone, Ron was gone, Harry was no longer on the ground, and a cry so awful she would remember it all her life rung in the air.
Then she had been grabbed from behind. This time, she knew there was no chance the hands she had been grabbed by were friendly. She had time to recognise the crumpled body on the ground before her as Ron's, and then, everything had gone black.
When she had woken up, she had been in her cell. She still didn't know what had happened. Fairly obviously, Ron had taken the full blast of the curse meant for Harry. She knew that he was dead. There was no doubt about it. But Harry...Harry had just disappeared. There could still have been hope.
However, the place she was in wasn't a place that inspired hope. Whenever one of those foul beings was near her, she knew that all was lost. Every doubt in her mind was almost confirmed, she didn't need to be told. There was no hope.
And so, there she was. Afraid to close her eyes, afraid to keep them open. Counting the cracks in the walls to keep her mind from the screams and images in her brain became a ritual. She was as much trapped inside her cell as she was her own mind, and while the bars of a cell could be penetrated with the right tool, there was no way she could escape from her own mind.