"He who fears he will suffer, already suffers because he fears" - Michel De Montaigne

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Sweat beaded on her forehead, she was trapped, suffocating. She was running, running fast and adamantly away from something, no someone. Her wrists were restrained, the cold bite of metal bit hungrily into her subtle skin. She couldn't free them, she tugged and she tugged, her running became uneven. She was tired, so tired. She kept running, but she couldn't see where she was running, the world in-front of her was forming as she entered it, that behind her disintegrating into nothingness apart from the swelling feeling in her chest of being watched, followed.

She had been fleeing a building, then covering vast grounds of damp grass, her bare feet slipping on the morning dew beginning to form. Now she was no where, everywhere, lost. Her chest heaved, her lungs fighting to draw breath in between the surges of panic and adrenaline. She was retching, retching as she ran, her body begging her to expel the energy that kept her moving. Just give in, let them take you, surrendering would be less painful that fighting. She continued, no matter how much her subconscious pleaded with her now, she must continue.

Something sharp scratched her arm, she felt the warm, familiar trickle of fresh blood melting down her forearm. The forest, she was in the forest, but which forest? The Forest of Dean she so often frequented with her parents in her previous life, or the Forbidden Forest on the edge of the School grounds? Where magical creatures of many descent resided, waiting, posed to attack. The nothingness she had been running towards now seemed to blur in total darkness, she was sure she'd never seen anything as black. It was difficult to breathe, where was she? A pressure weighed down on her lungs, pushing south on her body, her legs now moving of their own accord, she had lost control, she was just a puppet silently obeying the strings of her master.

What is that? Something glimmered in the distance, a stag, a patronus? "Harry?" She gasped out, her words spluttering from her lips. The light dispersed within seconds behind what she assumed was another tree. Whatever it was that was following her was bearing down on her quickly, covering ground much faster than she was weighted by her exhaustion. She kept going, she kept persevering, it wasn't in Hermione's nature to surrender herself, at least not until she really did not have a choice. She felt something grasping at her ankles, merely by millimetres, missing a solid grip each time. Searing pains shot up her legs, it felt like something sharp, sharp like shards of shattered glass, were slashing her heaving calves. She screamed, but the scream was internal, it rattled through her bones and expanded her organs against them.

Everything was still. She'd stopped. A deafening silence fell upon her like a veil. She was totally deprived of her senses. Is this what Death feels like? Blood began to pound in her ears, her mouth was dry. He was there, in front of her. He was perfect, just as she remembered him. He wasn't cut nor bloodied. His hair was as dishevelled as his character usually allowed for, his glasses weren't broken, his scar had vanished. Harry. He emitted a subtle glow, like that Fleur had when she walked down the aisle towards Bill. He watched her intently, he barely moved, why isn't he saying anything? She tried to step forward, to grab him, to keep him, to feel safe but she couldn't move. She was stuck.

"Hermione, RUN!" His bellow reverberated violently around her brain, her head began to pound. She had no time to question him, no time to seek shelter in the radiance of his presence. What had been chasing her had arrived, arrived at her final destination. Hot air caressed the back of her neck, her hair prickled, her pupils dilated. A low grumble of the beasts lungs made the ground beneath her shake.

She sat up, gasping for air. It had been another nightmare, another trick conjured by the vibrancy of her imagination. Harry had not been there. He had not been perfectly unharmed, he had not told her to run. The only truth in the matter was that the beast had caught up to her, consuming her, choking her. The beast was her reality, her confinement.

Looking around the room in which she had been sleeping, Hermione grounded herself, inhaling and exhaling in a steady rhythm. It didn't look the same as it once had, items that remotely embellished anything Gryffindor related had been removed, destroyed and replaced with serpents. The Slytherin aesthetic had never been something of any interest to her. In fact, she had rarely paid any attention to it, all she knew was that individuals unlucky enough to find themselves in that house were the ideal personification of it's past known nature. Hermione hauled her legs from the bed, they were still damp with perspiration and shaking from her nightmare. Sunlight streamed in through the window indicating that her alarm was due to starkly assault her ear drums at any given minute regardless.

She stood and took a little while to mentally adjust to her bare feet being firmly planted against the green and silver rug beneath them rather than brushing the damp grass still lining her subconscious. It was the only item Hermione would consider as 'luxury' in the room. She refused to call it her room, if she did, it would mean self resignation, accepting that this is her fate until death greets her. Death is inevitable, but perhaps it would be less lonely than this life I am so unlawfully subjected to now? She thought as she approached the makeshift bathroom, it consisted of a toilet and an old tub, a secondhand tub if that. When Voldemort had succeeded Harry in the battle, he had had the castle repaired and entirely repurposed. The old common rooms had been stripped bare and thin walls were erected splitting them into rows of sleeping chambers. Ironic, Hermione's inner dialogue scoffed, these chambers weren't adequate enough for anyone to have a beneficial nights sleep in and even if she managed to acquire even a droplet of a dreamless sleep draught, she was sure to be dragged from her bed and ordered to return to work.

Everyday, her alarm would ring at 7am, occasionally she was sure it had been hexed because no matter what she did it wouldn't stop ringing, a method of torture to torment her, she had assumed. She would strip the loosely woven bedclothes from her body and slip into the tub. Often the water would be lukewarm, but this was fine to her, the more unbearable the temperature was, the less challenging it was to re-emerge from it. Hermione had abandoned all hope when it came to her hair, her appearance was the least of her concerns, it had grown quite far down her back in the time since war broke out and the most she could do was scrape it into a low ponytail. Returning to the room where she slept, upon the table by the window, there would be a bowl of porridge waiting for her alongside that morning's copy of the Daily Prophet. The food was bland, mundane but she was long past fantasising over something with more flavour, eating was a chore, nothing but another job she was obliged to complete.

Her fingers longingly caressed the edge of this Morning's prophet, the feeling of newsprint was one of the only things she still found joy in. The content of the articles were morbid, horrifying and permanently glorifying Voldemort's reign and control over the nation, but the inking upon it, the movement of the images were still a beautiful sight to Hermione, a tribute to her life before. Her eyes skimmed the front page as she spooned some of the unsatisfactorily undercooked oats to her mouth. Dark Lord Conquers Austria, Albania and Czechoslovakia. It would seem his bid to extent his empire was well underway. The faces celebrating in the accompanying images infuriated Hermione and she turned the page abruptly, a tear forming at the corner of the fold embodying her disdain. The social affairs page, as much as it irritated her seeing pure-blood families holding balls or intimate luncheons and it been given such a prestigious positioning in the Prophet, she did privately revel in the thought of them choking on their scones, or getting their feet stuck in the under layers of their gowns and falling painfully down the marble steps of their manors.

Just as I expected. She thought as there before her on the page was an image of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy. They had become quite a hot topic in the socialite pages since Voldemort's take over. But considering Lucius' insubordination in the way of his servitude, Hermione was surprised that the images showed him fit and well, rather than, well frankly, dead and buried. "We are both blessed and excited" the heading read, Hermione couldn't imagine what else the Malfoy's could be offered that they didn't already have which constituted them being 'excited' about something new. She read on. "Our son, Draco's meeting with Miss Astoria Greengrass, was a success, it is with great hope and optimism that we offered our interview to the Prophet today. The possibility and prosperity of an heir is something that we could all use in these unprecedented times."

Hermione choked on her oats, "prosperity of an heir?" She muttered to herself, laughing lightly. The Draco she had remembered, from before the war, was spiteful, conceited and the thought of him cloning himself in a way of an heir was, in her opinion, unfortunate for the world. Her eyes scoured lazily through the rest of the article, she did not wish to go into great detail on how forced marriages were still a thing. At the bottom of the article there was an image of Draco and Astoria sitting down to lunch together. She is beautiful, well-kept and very attractive, Hermione sighed catching a glimpse of her reflection in her spoon, Astoria was everything she was not. Draco on the other hand, he had aged, he was broader, his jaw more defined and his stare sharper than the latter mentioned. A smirk graced her lips, she loved seeing Draco Malfoy unsatisfied, unhappy. Those expressions were exactly what she wished for him and any of his dull-witted followers. In fact, she was quite content that her only exposure to him was from beyond the protective barrier of the paper infront of her.

The bell rang out across the castle, right on cue, as expected. It was time to go. Hermione was unsure why a bell was the method chosen to summon her to the briefing room. She was the only one residing there other than Madam Pomfrey, and she already lived, slept and breathed in the hospital wing. It is just because, Hermione summarised, a display of power, of control, domination. She raised to her feet, the metal of her spoon clanging hollowly against the ceramic dish as she closed the front cover of the Prophet. Metaphorically suffocating Malfoy was a great pleasure of hers. A cool chill hit her slightly flushed cheeks as she opened the door, she breathed in deeply and began her descent down the corridor towards the old Headmaster's office. Everyday on her walk, to collect her instructions, it seemed as if something different had changed. It had not, the walls were bare, the portraits that had remained, bore expressionless faces and silence echoed deafeningly between the stoned corridor walls. The issue was not that the castle was becoming more like a prison everyday, but that it was nothing as it should be. If Hermione allowed herself to close her eyes, just momentarily, as she walked she could hear distant shrieking and a rumbling wave of excitement from the direction of the old quidditch field, she could hear the busy clatter of knives and forks in the great hall, or Hagrid's billowing laugh from somewhere out in the forest. It wasn't a luxury she allowed herself too often because although the high of hearing what she had once loved was exhilarating, euphoric even, the stark loneliness her mind would plummet back to as soon as she opened her eyes was debilitating.

"Ah, Granger, only 37 seconds late this morning. It would seem your time keeping skills at least, are finally beginning to improve." Dolohov drawled from behind the desk. Hermione remained cool, her expression indifferent. She felt personally insulted whenever he looked at her, or when any of them did in all honesty. She had come to realise that the Death Eaters worked on a rotational basis, at the beginning of the week she answered to Antonin Dolohov, in the middle of the week, Corban Yaxley and the end, Delores Umbridge. She couldn't decide which was better and this really was something she spent a lot of time contemplating. Dolohov was dirty, greasy in appearance, just being around him made Hermione want to submerge herself in a boiling hot bath and drown there. Yaxley was a creep, perverted and didn't have any sense of when to keep his hands or even his thoughts to himself. Which leaves Umbridge, Hermione need not even explain her difficulties with that bitch. She had concluded that she would rather die a savage, wickedly barbaric death than work under the instruction of any of them.

She stood, her arms folded firmly around her chest, her finger subconsciously tapping her upper arm in irritation as she observed him, she did not wish to humour his small talk, or acknowledge his arrogance. She simply wanted to be told what she was doing that day. Although, even without his words she could assume what it would be, on the whole it was the same tasks to be completed each day. Clean and scrub the hospital wing, ensure stock is plentiful and work alongside Poppy in any unfinished tasks. However, Hermione knew better than to grow comfortable with a routine and to always expect the unexpected. During her first few months of her captivity within the castle under Voldemort's ruling, herself and Poppy had been deployed, under a heavy force of Death Eaters, to a battle sight in Russia. Hermione never understood how they had been apparated there, cross-continent apparition is supposedly something no witch or wizard is able to do by theory, without painfully splinching themselves in half. She soon came to understand however that since the Battle, a lot of the theory covered by the books she had once studied had been disproved.

"Today you are to disinfect the wing ready for inspection, you are to ensure all utilities are correct and suitably functioning and then this afternoon, you shall be sent subjects in which you are expected to heal, in form of an examination." Dolohov's lips spread into a sickening smirk. Subjects. This happened far too often for Hermione's approval, it was inhumane and she found the thought utterly despairing. After the Battle of Hogwarts, Voldemort exerted such power in atrocity, that his actions resulted in the fateful crumbling of the muggle parliament as well as the total destruction of the Ministry of Magic. He was in complete and unlawful control of Britain in its entirety meaning that any laws that had once protected its people were now void and he could do what he wished, when he wished with whoever he wished. The storm that followed in his succession of Harry, was inexplicable. He put in force a range of programmes, with the aim to replenish the purity of wizarding blood within the United Kingdom. When Hermione discovered the schemes in which Voldemort had concocted, the only way she could objectively define it, in its simplest and politest form, was as 'cleansing.' Banishing muggles from even existing within the same realms of pure bloods, capturing muggle borns and half-bloods to perform obscene duties for their 'hosts' and "purifying the air for those more deserving" were some of the main clauses within his manifesto. In this instance, what Dolohov meant by subjects, is people who have been captured by the cause and harmed using dark magic, their only hope in survival was at the hands of herself and Poppy. They were expected to save the lives of these individuals in order to pass their assessment to prove to the Dark Lord that they are still worthy of their own lives themselves. Death would be the only medicinal practice that would benefit these poor souls, Hermione would often discreetly state to Poppy as they worked and as much as they agreed on the ideology of consented euthanasia, their only option was to heal them, or risk dying themselves. Whilst Hermione did not fear death as much as she welcomed the sweet, tantalising relief offered by it, she needed to know that when the time was right, there would be someone strong enough to rebuild the resistance.