I think I will end it here or on the next chapter, sorry I wasn't able to post anything in the past weeks, I´ve been at war with my condo, my neighbors and it won't be ending soon. Thanks to all of my readers if you´re still there waiting for this chapter.

"Wit without measure is mankind's biggest treasure" … that stuck with her since she first laid eyes on that phrase as an excitable 11-year-old who was reading Hogwarts a History. Oh how she loved that book. She loved it and hated it on equal parts. Whenever it came to some of the things written about Slytherin she felt… weird and somehow angry, and she couldn't place why. That was just one of the many mysteries that came with her new life. Before it all happened she felt out of place, as she didn't belong.

Professor McGonagall was the only anchor she had at the beginning in a sea of uncertainty. Head held high and hair in a tight bun, she was someone that looked and felt trustworthy and maybe that's why her parents agreed in the first place to let her go to this place that they didn't even knew about and didn't show up anywhere. As if it never existed and just popped out the earth itself.

If someone like Professor Dumbledore had appeared to collect her, she wouldn't have ever set eyes on Hogwarts, of that she was certain.

For her it was like that on a lot of things, a sense of wonder bur also of fear and a whole lot of butterflies fluttering their wings inside her tummy. But nothing could ever surpass when she first learned about magic, being a witch and suddenly finding yourself introduced on a whole new world that worked completely different to what you were used to.

Having to process that in as little time as she was given wasn't something easy and that made her respect and feel a sense of kingship with other kids in her position, the so called muggleborns and even some half-bloods that didn't know anything about magic before getting their Hogwarts letter.

She wanted to learn it all. With a thirst for knowledge and a sense of urgency that drove her to read and get lost from the world for hours on end, even forgetting to bathe and sleep sometimes and her mother scolded her daily and even threatened to call of her going to Hogwarts. That's was the first hurdle she had to overcome and also a moment where she got to know real fear and how accidental magic reacted to that fear.

She also realized her parents were scared of her. That was a hard pill to swallow.

No kid wanted to disappoint their parents; so far they've been proud of her. She was praised in school and every other activity she practiced and her instructors gushed on and on about her qualities, that had earned her hate from other children and even adults. She was used to it.

But she never wanted to be feared by her own parents. She loved them!

Her mother was scared of her afterwards and things were never the same.

That was the first thing she lost for Hogwarts and magic, she loved her parents but even if her mother feared her, she wanted to go there. It was a wish burning in her very soul.

Determined as she was to learn about what made her different, she wanted to learn in order to control it and never scare or hurt someone she loved again.

She didn't want to scare her parents, and trying to see the positive side of things… she didn't have friends she might miss when she went to Hogwarts instead of her current school.

Making the shift wasn't really so difficult academically wise since she read everything she could get her hands on. But it was a cultural shock and she found that this society was somewhat backwards in some of their policies and their treatment of women, nothing as atrocious as in Islamic countries. She couldn't wrap her head around how purebloods managed their marriages. She didn't like it one bit.

She definitely wouldn't like to be treated like that and thanked her lucky stars she wasn't born in such a family. Being independent was something she grew up looking forward to, not being someone´s trophy wife and not getting to do anything she wanted. Besides… pregnancy and childbirth scared her a bit. Being responsible for another human being was no laughing matter.

She could barely keep herself safe since she meet Ron and Harry! She loved them to pieces but certainly she still wanted to get decent grades and stay alive!

…

Priorities shifted as years passed. She couldn't possibly hold onto her sanity if she thought about the time. She tried and tried every day with all her might, but she felt a little bit of herself slipping by like the water running on a river. The wardens delighted in trying to harm her, but she had always been adept at wand less magic. It was one of her best kept secrets, not even the husband her family forced on her knew about such an ability.

Perish the thought that Azkaban had flaws, even if she couldn't get away from this place, she still had the ability to fend for herself. Even if her body was looked, her mind was free. She´ll wait for her lord. He´ll come, he was different. He was the kind of man she´d want to marry if she were only given a choice in the matter. Every waking moment of her life had been a contradiction and a struggle. How could she be proud of her heritage and hate it so much at the same time? Her blood gave her everything, but her blood also took everything away.

Cursed blood she didn't want to pass onto the next generation.

They were coming again, to feed of the wailing idiots in the surrounding cells. Baboons the lot of them, fools! They didn't even deserve to kiss the soles of the Dark Lord´s shoes.

He will come back and clean the world of filth, correct mistakes and injustice and create a perfect world in which she could be proud of her blood and valued by her true talents and not just as a pretty bought trophy that just had to shut up and look pretty, be stuffed with child and blindly obey her buyer.

How could she be proud of being borne a daughter of such a family? Surely, a B… deserved better.

Oh how she envied Cissy for being able to get the most of it.

She got a shitty hand in life.

…

Her nightmares kept getting the best of her, Hermione woke up covered in sweat and shivering, she thanked her starts that she didn't scream like Harry did, she had woken up enough times with the noise and… really, their fellow Gryffindors reactions to it were appealing after the first couple of times.

Those weird dreams left her tired and shaky, utterly exhausted and perturbed. She felt like she just fought a tug-o-war with the woman in her nightmares, she could never see her face, she just knew the woman was in a bad place, that looked like some abandoned house filled with darkness and what looked like ghosts.

She was a logical person, but somehow her mind closed up when she tried to come up with something to help her solve this situation. She just hid it to the best of her ability. It was enough with Harry´s nightmares and everything he had heaped on his plate, also they- Harry and her- had to deal with some of Ron´s darkest traits, she really didn't want to add even more to it.

This had to stop eventually. Right?

Oh, but it didn't. it just got worse.

…

Hermione didn't believe in poetic nonsense such as facing your own fears upfront. Especially when such fears included visions of something you didn't know if it was quite real or not. It just didn't happen in her books, things could be explained and reasoned away and that was it, whatever couldn't be… it was just nonsense to begin with.

But when she found just that, the woman in her visions, in the real world and not in her dreams… she had been running with Ron and Harry, trying and failing to find the horrocruxes and destroy them in the least amount of time they could manage, knowing all the destruction and death the Death eaters and Voldemort were wrecking on the wizarding world weighing heavily on their shoulders.

And when Hermione laid eyes on Bellatrix Lestrange something clicked and she almost stuck paralyzed on the floor. Completely consumed and dominated with an all-encompassing terror, the woman of her nightmares stood before her and in seeing her, she saw herself and that didn't make any sense. Bellatrix Lestrange was a deranged pureblood that delighted in killing and torturing those who stood in her way, and she even killed them whenever she was given the chance. How could it be? Something like this was against everything she ever knew to be real, and no one else would be able to understand it if she shared it. She was terrified, devastated and ashamed, all at a time. Ashamed that such darkness could be related to her, that something that atrocious could be traced back to her. it didn't make a shred of sense, but it just was.

Meeting those deranged eyes, the shallow and pale face, the wild hair and black robes with her poised wand and her bloodlust… Harry and Ron didn't really get what scared her the most of that moment. They thought she was terrified of the torture she will face in the hands of one of Voldemort´s strongest death eaters.

They had it partly right, she was terrified of finally meeting the vision she so desperately tried to bury in the darkest recesses of her mind. And the woman had been vicious.

At a point in time, Hermione felt like floating out of her body… and something most wonderful and terrifying happened. she knew deep down she had died.

Died at the hands of herself. She had killed herself. Bellatrix Lestrange was her, and she was Bellatrix Lestrange, and she had also been Rowena Ravenclaw herself… and… she had been a queen in a long forgotten realm that looked like a paradise and a fantasy merged together with lots of sunlight and gold, and a lion… that somehow shared a reality with her own world. But it wasn't quite right. She had forgotten her face and almost every detail of that. Learning all of that information while she had been out of her body left her with little to no time to try and make sense of the sensory overload she was getting.

Later, when she woke up in Shell Cottage, alive and well. She cried her eyes out.

Faced with that earth-shattering revelation she couldn't react differently, Fleur and Bill, even Ron and Harry, thought it was because of her traumatic experiences and Dobby´s death. Harry took it really bad, he was devastated and blamed himself on the first place for it. If they hadn't been caught, Dobby wouldn't have died getting them out of Malfoy Manor, not even their new found pity for Malfoy- Draco- diminished their forlorn thoughts.

Maybe they had needed help in the first place, but it was too late for involving anyone else on this task, and they also couldn't bear the shame implied on such action.

After rejecting help freely offered they had to sort themselves out or go and ask for assistance.

…

Rattled and untouched after the latest torture session of her Lord and… lover. Bellatrix was left with something to ponder. And she had a lot of time to do so. The Dark Lord wanted her to stay put on Malfoy Manor to look after their daughter, Delphini.

And hopefully, conceive another heir. She didn't cheat herself on that one. Women were often looked down on when it came to inheritance and Lordship positions.

Everyone knew about it, Dephini being the dark heiress and not a Lestrange rained critics and insults on Bellatrix and even if she was still married to Rodolphus she owed him nothing- and in part that was the reason she accepted in first place- her marriage was just in name, no one in their right mind will go against the Dark Lord on anything. And even if he felt utterly humiliated and resentful, Rodolphus appreciated his boosted influence more than he appreciated her.

And she had been content until that last visit of the snatchers….

Torturing that bushy haired mudblood was the snapping point. The implications of what her magic was telling her and what she felt at the time… it was enough to drive her mad, for real this time.

Everyone thought she was crazy, they expected anything from her and that served as the best defense, the only one she could allow herself to have, the only one able to look past that had been him and even he had changed in the end. He still expected her to default and act as a woman first and a powerful ally, second.

She knew there were a lot of death eaters in the Dark Lord´s ranks that loathed her and her bedding their lord hadn't helped matters. They delighted in calling her whore whenever they thought they could get away with it.

She could do whatever she wanted with them without fearing the consequences but that brought little to no satisfaction on her empty days.

The mystery she had been facing all her life just happened to unravel a new piece to a lot more she tried to gather and make sense of the whole picture.

Maybe she just had to give up in trying to make sense of the whole mess. But then again, she wanted to know for as long as this kept happening, why it happened on the first place and… why her?