Hermione woke, her skin slick with the cold sweat of her dreams the night before. She felt ill as she rolled from her bed and stood on uneasy legs.

She'd been having the same torturous dreams since she was old enough to remember, always of the same thing, her loved ones being killed by a man with nothing but a pure white face and piercing black eyes. He killed, and he killed, and he killed and then he laughed.

She scratched at the skin of her arm, as if something were there that should be bothering her.

Her eyes flicked down to look at the space on her arm, nothing, as it always was.

As it always had been.

She settled on the side of her bed, in a seated position and glanced around the dorm she shared with several other Gryffindor girls. Crookshanks jumped into her lap and she stroked his back absently, her eyes closing and opening as she tried to shake away the remnants of her dreams.

She was old enough now this shouldn't be a problem, fifteen years old was old enough to have forgotten those wicked dreams.

Or at least, she thought it was.

The fact she had been suffering the dreams for so many years had not escaped her. In fact, she'd spent the better part of her fourth year as a student at Hogwarts researching past lives in the library.

-It had yielded a surprisingly low number of results and left her incredibly frustrated.

She knew there was a reason for the dreams, she just couldn't pin-point it. If it wasn't a past life then it must be something else, something similar.

She could talk to Ginny about it, or maybe even Rose, but she kept it to herself. She was the one everyone came to with their questions, not the other way around.

She groaned and rubbed the back of her neck as Crookshanks jumped from the bed with a loud meow and left the room, his tail twitching his annoyance. The witch rolled her eyes with a sigh and cast a quick tempus for the time, the sun would be rising in less than an hour, there was no use trying to go back to sleep.

Instead she decided to slip from the dorms and into the girls' lavatory for a shower, she was feeling disgusting from the cold sweat that clung to her skin. Maybe it was just what she needed to feel better.

Maybe someday she would understand the dreams, and then she could figure out how to counter them. She blinked at the image, still embedded in her mind's eye, Professor Snape holding her fingers in his, looking at her with those intense eyes and giving her the sweetest of smile.
Hermione shook her head and hurried to finish her bath. These were not thoughts she should be having.