Title: Shackles

Author: Nacata

Summary: They were trapped there: all of them. In the halls they used to run down, the classrooms they used to sleep in, the dormitories they used to gossip in. They were shackled to the sole place that had ever provided them safety. They weren't kidding when they said school was a prison. AU

Chapter 2: Bones (Hermione Granger)

Rating: T for heavy language, mildly descriptive gore, frequent sexual situations and heavy violence. (Rating subject to change?)

Shipping: Still tentative.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter. Yet. Just you wait, Rowling…when you least expect it…I'll be there.

Author's Note: And onto the next chapter! Which was…written about two hours after the first. Aren't you all proud of me? I'm actually being fairly efficient! Yay Nicole! Thanks to anyone who reviewed. It's much appreciated. (: This would be Hermione's chapter. It's my first attempt at writing anything from her point of view.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

But it wasn't the best of times, it was just the worst of times, and Hermione Granger would appreciate it if Charles Dickens would cut the crap because we all know he got paid by the word anyway so the only reason his novels were so goddamn long was because he had to put bread on the table and she imagined that whatever other jobs he clearly wasn't working weren't paying for his meals. Stupid fucking artists and their stupid fucking starvation. There were other people starving too, didn't they know? Other people who hadn't chosen such a lifestyle: other people who were born into it.

Hermione hadn't been born directly into it, but her present predicament was a consequent of her birth, she supposed. Not that she was unwishing her existence or something terribly cliché like that. She didn't want any ghosts of Christmas Past or Present or Future creeping up into her cell to disturb her in the middle of the night—to take her away. There were people that needed her here, and she had ghosts of her own to deal with.

Like Luna.

Like Neville.

Like Dean.

Like…Ron.

If any of Scrooge's ghoulish guides tried abducting her in the middle of the night, she was going to have to pull out some of the self-defense moves she'd learned in that silly (but surprisingly useful) class her mother had enrolled her in. Really now, when would she need to know how to outrun or physically harm a predator when she had her wand at her disposal?

--

Well, the answer appeared to be now.

Now, as Crabbe kicked her curtly in the ribs, sending her sprawling across the cold stone floor where she could smell the decay of life itself, the stones thirsty for her blood. The castle was out to get her. Was closing in on her. Shit, she couldn't breathe—

Now she could breathe. Great, big, staggering breaths. But she had to force them, had to remind her lungs to expand, to allow oxygen in and out, savoring the taste of the air, even as dank and as stale as it was. If she couldn't taste it, she was dead. That was her constant test. No air meant no life, it was simple science really. Simple science like the physics of Goyle's foot on her hair. She should've known better than to move, but flinch she did, struggling to get away as panic kicked in and made logic useless, her fingers scraping at the floor, shoving her form as far from Goyle as she could get but all this managed to do was burn her scalp, as his foot did not lift and her hair did not budge. She stifled a sob, giving them only the satisfaction of a quiet grunt.

"Stop it!" She could hear Ron's voice faintly, but he seemed farther than sensibility told her he was. Their cages were what—a mere fifteen feet apart? No, eighteen feet, she thought, her vision blurring as she glanced towards where he was clawing at the air just beyond his prison bars. "Get offa' her! You're hurting her! Shit, Hermione, you're bleeding." Her vision blurred again and she faltered backward from her knees, the air embracing her, pulling her down to the stone floor, bolting her there with a throbbing pain spreading quickly through her limbs.

She turned her head just slightly to see Ron's face, pained, flushed, beautiful. Something slammed down hard on her palm and she gasped, arching her back, her head falling limply so that her hair plummeted beneath her, pooling on the floor. Tears stung at her eyes, making the blackness that handicapped her vision grow fuzzy and hot. The object on her hand, a foot, she realized, pes in latin—no, more specifically it was the calcaneus. Crabbe's calcaneus (in simpler terms: his heel) was pressing down hard on her palm, the pressure perhaps enough to snap her delicate bones. Let's see—Crabbe was roughly…what? Two hundredweights? No, three. (He'd been digesting a great amount more than he used to, mostly, she assumed, to flaunt the fact that he could eat whatever and whenever he liked to the prisoners beneath him.) Three hundredweights of pressure on her tiny hand. Now the stone floor could either act as a messiah or her Achilles heel. Achilles calcaneus. If her hand was angled wrong, if there was too much room between her bones and the stone floor, then the impact of his foot might doom her. But if she kept her hand just perfectly still, pressed down against the stone rather than up against his foot, she might achieve minimum damage of her—

Fuck.

Theory aborted.

He'd definitely just broken something. Perhaps a bone or two or all five in her metacarpus. (That would be her palm.) Perhaps a finger as well. And certainly her wrist if she dared to push her hand upward to release his hold on her.

"Hermione!" Ron's voice was nearly drowned out by a terribly frightening something else, which she didn't recognize as her own screams until she saw the tears of frustration building at the edges of his eyes. "Get offa' her! Get off!" He had lunged, as if to pitch himself through the bars but they caught on the muscles of his arms, too big to fit through. She almost wished him back to his lanky teenage self. The pressure on her hand disappeared and she rolled onto her side, pushing herself up with her one good wrist to shake her head wildly.

"No, no, no! Ron, you imbecile!" She was shrieking at him still as Goyle hauled her back to the cage she shared with Luna, where the girl was watching them wide-eyed but silent. She heard the door of her own cage slam shut and she knew whom they were after now. She tucked her head between her knees and held her wounded hand against her chest, the other palm pressed against her ear, trying to block out the sounds of Ron's silence.

Silence was lethal. They wanted to hear screams. She controlled her shoulders, willing them not to shake with her sobs as she listened to the heavy sounds of fists and bone, toes and bone, heels and bone. Then there was silence, and her head snapped up, knowing already where Crabbe's hand was headed, expecting it when he pulled out his wand.

"Ron!" She scolded, looking at his limp form on the ground, her voice rising shrilly. "Scream, you bloody idiot! Scream!" They kicked him onto his side so he could face her and he flashed her a weak smile, lip curling under the bruise forming beneath his left eye. Crabbe pointed his wand directly at Ron's back, smirking.

"Crucio."

Once the curse left his lips, there was silence again. Just the occasional sound of Ron twitching on the ground, thrashing, some part of him connecting with the cold floor. Hermione, in her desperation, curled back into the familiarity of science, naming each of his body parts as they struck the floor loudest.

Patella.

Tibia.

Ulna.

Radius.

Scapula.

Mandible.

Cranium.

--

Hermione studied the shape of his shoulders, his spine, his legs as Dean gently propped him against the iron bars, keeping him from choking on his own blood as it dribbled downward from his nose, over his lips, across his throat and pooled at the collar of his shirt, staining the white t-shirt crimson along the edges. "Is he still breathing normally?" She called over tentatively, clutching at the bars of her cage with her one good hand, the other still cradled at her chest, stuck in an odd angle she cringed to look down at. Dean nodded calmly and Hermione fidgeted, unable to grasp how her friend could be so very soothed when just the other day she'd watched Dolohov try to burn part of his face off. It had taken a full twelve hours (that was her estimate, considering the guards' shifts) for him to calm back down after that, Luna humming to him across the room, watching him serenely and making lulling sounds until he was dragged back into his usual passivity by her dreamy smile.

Ron coughed suddenly and stirred before slumping again, his head rolling to the side, resting uncomfortably against his shoulder. Hermione tensed until he was still again, watching his chest rise and fall in perfect rhythm, able to distinguish his figure even in the dark classroom. "What the hell do they want from us?" She asked the silence finally, burying her head again between her knees. Luna's fingers drummed the cage bars, her bones clinking with hollow, haunting beats against the iron.

Turning her eyes brightly on Hermione, she smiled that serene little smile and patted the girl's hand comfortingly—her good hand, that was. "Shh. Harry will be here soon and then all of this will be over. You'll see."

Hermione didn't imagine that she would.

She'd be dead by the time Harry came back, if he ever came back at all. If he were dead, Hermione imagined that the Dark Lord would've made it very clear—would've brought his body in and hung it high in the Great Hall for all to see, all except herself, Luna, Ron and Dean. They were not allowed upstairs for meals; it was solitary confinement of a deeper degree, for they were not alone. Instead, they were blessed with the good fortune of watching one another suffer, hearing one another crying, knowing that one of them had to die first, but always uncertain of who it would be. Once or twice, Hermione had had the selfishness to pray that it would be her.

As there was, Harry's body had made no appearance and so there was hope. And that was dangerous, especially to the Dark Lord. She had heard rumors…whispers of uprisings forming in the castle halls, in the classrooms, perhaps even amongst some of his own followers. Not all of the guards were Death Eaters, and perhaps that had been his mistake. In his eagerness to hurt, to shred, he had forced blood-traitors into the halls as security. They knew better than to lash out, they understood where that would land them, but they did not help prisoners either, and Hermione could not decide if she was disgusted with them, or impressed by their smarts.

Oliver Wood. Seamus Finnegan. Cormac McLaggen—these were people she had spent years upon years fighting beside. Now they stood exactly where they always had: next to her, but the same intentions did not flank their bones as the ones that did hers. They were skeletons of their former selves. Very smart skeletons, for choosing their battles so wisely, for staying alive, but was nobility or survival the right priority here? Was she angry at them for betraying her? For refusing to help her? Or was she satisfied that they weren't dead? That they hadn't done anything brave and bold and utterly stupid like Ron tended to do?

It didn't matter. They'd all probably be dead come the end of this anyway…bones littering the castle floors, skeletons on parade. It was inevitable. That was what everyone came back to: bones. Matter. Nothing more.

--

When she dreamed, she dreamed of her skeleton rising from the animalistic cage it was imprisoned in, slipping through the confines, moving to the other cage. She imagined her bones dancing with Ron's bones as the survivors of the war came down to look at them, sobbing over the loss. The contrast of the happy waltz she and Ron were spinning only made the picture feel surreal and logical to her: all matter must have an opposite. Negative, positive. Bones, flesh. Sadness, happiness. It was how the world negated itself, how it equalized. When the balance was tipped, chaos emerged. Chaos like the world she would awake to in a few short hours when a new shift of guards came down to taunt them.

She was starkly aware that she was dreaming, but she couldn't pull herself from it. As horrific as it was, as macabre, as grotesque, as twisted, she was happier there in the dream than she was in the waking world. With her flesh gone, her soul gone, her life gone, her skeleton looked carefree and weightless as it glided with Ron's. How she knew it was his, she couldn't say—no red hair, no freckles, no sulky pout, the absence of these distinguishing characteristics made it difficult to know it was him, and yet know she did. Their bones twirled, their pace increasing until a gust of wind swept the room, shattering them into heaps of jumbled body parts on the floor, her bones mixing with his, impossible to tell who was who anymore.

When she awoke, she awoke to the perfect stillness of their former classroom and pressed her forehead hard against her kneecap, biting her lip until it drew blood, blood, glorious, red, lively blood. It wasn't bones, at least. That was something to celebrate.

"Hermione?" Ron's voice wafted from across the room and she scrambled on her knees to the bars, scraping her skin in the process, drawing more blood, more beautiful blood.

"Yes?" She held her breath, her eyes adjusting slowly to the distance and the darkness. Darkness tolerable. Distance manageable. Darkness + Distance painful. She couldn't see him, couldn't feel him, and when at last her eyes were able to identify the very bare essentials of his form, she was unpleased with what she saw.

Bones.

Bones, protruding from a break in the skin covering his knee, bent odd, misshapen, wretched. She turned away and put the fingers of her good hand to her mouth, closing her eyes for just a second of solace before she opened them again. "Ron, your knee…"

"Eh. I can't feel it," He replied, his voice a comfort in the thick blackness. Outside she heard someone clear their throat and she knew instantly that it was Seamus Finnegan on duty, guarding outside the room, unable to come in and face them. "I can't feel a lot right now, actually. Maybe that whole emotional range of a teaspoon thing is a blessing, eh?" He laughed weakly, then coughed again. Hermione tasted her blood in her mouth as she sunk her teeth down harder.

"Doesn't anything hurt at all?" She whispered.

Ron hesitated. "…Er, no."

Wrong answer. Panic was pressing in on her, drowning her, filling her lungs with heavy rushing water and making it difficult to--

"Breathe, Hermione!" That was it. That was the word. She sucked in a steadying breath and refocused her eyes.

"Ron, I think you're going into shock."

"I'm going into shock? You're bloody mad. You're the one that was about to pass out from lack of oxygen."

"No, I mean, you can't feel any pain. You're going into shock."

Ron paused, chuckled, shifted and drew a sharp gasp. "Oi. I was only telling you that because I figured it was what you wanted to hear. Of course it hurts somewhere. Shit, my left arm feels like it's covered in little needles."

Hermione relaxed, even if he couldn't see the tension seep from her muscles. "Oh. Right. Sorry."

"Don't apologize. You were just looking out for me." Silence entombed them again. "Hermione?"

"Yes?"

"Thanks for that. Looking out for me, I mean."

"—That reminds me." Another second of silence, then:

"'EY! What the hell was that for?!"

Hermione's left shoe had by some inexplicable event, made its way across the room and nearly caught Ron in the right shoulder, if not for the fact that she hadn't angled it right and the bars deflected the blow, landing the footwear an arm's length from Ron and Dean's cage.

"You idiot! What were you thinking!? They were nearly done with me, you just should've let them finish! Then they would've left for dinner and you wouldn't have gotten your arse kicked. And then, to top it all off, can you accept their play like normal people? Oooh, no. Merlin forbid that you Weasley men know how to take a blow. You have to go all thick and masculine on us. All they wanted was for you to scream, Ron. If you'd just bloody screamed, it wouldn't have been over quicker and we wouldn't have had to listen to, or not listen to, or shit, I don't—"

"Breathe," Ron reminded her again and she sucked in another deep lungful of hair. She hadn't realized how close she was to another panic attack, the tears streaming thinly down her face. Ron stared at her from across the room, having trouble seeing her with the clarity she seemed to see him. "…It's alright," He murmured finally, listening to the fading of her hiccups and sobs.

"No, no, it's not alright. We're going to die, Ron. We're going to die…"

"Shh. 'Mione. Harry will come back for us, alright?"

"He doesn't even know we're here! No one's around to tell him!"

"Last we checked, nobody had brought Gin or Neville in yet. We've still got a chance."

"We're going to die," She repeated, shoulders shaking with alarming fragility. "We're going to die." Ron became still and quiet, unwilling to fight her, perhaps too weak to continue arguing. She rocked back and forth, trying to soothe herself, reminding herself consistently to keep breathing, keep breathing. He had too much bloody hope. It was dangerous, all that faith in something that might never happen. He was dangerous. Or endangered. Or both.

"You'll see, Hermione, you'll see."

No, she wouldn't. None of them would. They were going to die, and that was that.

Author's Note: And we're onto Chapter Three. Purple button me?