Hello. This is going to be a rather serious story. Most chapters will be rated T, but some may be M- I will put a chapter rating at the top of each chapter. This is a Lumione fic. If you do not like that, then please remove yourself. That's all I'm going to be saying on the matter. All troll-y and flame-y reviews will be ignored unless you actually state something intelligent. Thanks.

Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or settings in this story. Merely the plot.

Enjoy and please review and let me know what you think. Thanks so much for reading.

Chapter One: Mirror in the Manor

Hermione Granger stared at her distorted reflection in the warped, narrow mirror that hung in the hall of the guest wing on the third floor. She barely recognized herself anymore. Gaunt faced and too-pale skin, black-blue rings of misery beneath her eyes, unruly hair unrulier than ever. She'd been here for two weeks now, two long and empty weeks. A week before those weeks, she'd lain there crying in the rain on the ground just outside of Hogwarts as the heel of a boot pressed her head into the mud and an unfortunately familiar voice happily chanted 'Mudblood' over and over only a few feet above her head. 'Now you're really dirty, aren't you?'

She wasn't there when Harry fell. She'd gone back out to help heal and distribute blood replenishing potions, removing the stoppers with shaking fingers as her heart did flips inside of her and her own wounds bleed profusely, her dirty blood mixing in with the blood of her friends who were dying right in front of her, whose bodies littered the ground like water cups and snack wrappers after a football game. Used up. Discarded. Shells, husks, emptied vessels. In the moment that the dark mark tore open the sky and green smoke rained down upon her with a terrible roar, it had all felt so wasteful. All of it had been for nothing. She had passed out with the knowledge of that ringing in her ears, with her mind screaming out in horrifying realization that everyone she loved was dead and it was all over.

Somewhere the voice of a dead man was mocking her: 'The Insufferable Know-It-All doesn't know it all, now does she?'

When she woke up it had been raining, pouring as if the clouds had fallen too, their bellies sliced open and bleeding all over the battlefield just as her friends had. Their bodies were still there, cold and unmoving. Even with the frenzy of raindrops it was stomach-churningly still. If you could not have seen the blood in the dirt and grass, staining their cloaks and robes and shirts and skirts, drying in their hair and against their cheeks, or their eyes locked in a staring contest with the grim reaper- If you looked over the fields from just the right angle, you might have thought that all these people had just laid down in the field for an afternoon snooze and that now they were caught in the rain unaware. But Hermione could not find that sacred angle from which to look upon them, because for her it no longer existed. She was there when the people laid down for their final rest, she'd lain down with them. She hadn't meant to wake up again… Not alone, not like this.

If she was dead like she had wanted to be, then Heaven was a cruel illusion, another one of Voldemort's curses. After waking up she'd tried to run for the forest, get lost in there somewhere, hoping to Merlin that maybe one of her friends had survived, that someone who wasn't an enemy would be in there. She never even made it to the treeline. Shouts met her ears from the moment she bolted from where she'd been kneeling after waking up. Bolts of light of varying colors flew past her as she ran down the hills in a panic. Her wand was nowhere on her person, probably out there in the field somewhere… Broken by now, she was sure. A spell struck her in the back and down she'd sailed, face first into the mud as she tripped from the impact. Her lip split against a rock, her teeth numb, her nose throbbing. And as panting breaths and shrill laughter descended on her through the shield of pouring rain, as the heel of the boot held her face in the dirt, she sobbed. The horrid sounds produced from her own body were all she'd had power over in that awful moment of helplessness and despair.

She had cried herself sick, vomiting up blood and sick all over her own face and into her hair. Above her Bellatrix still taunted, laughing harder than ever. Through the rain and the tears and blood, Hermione could see that a crowd of Death Eaters had gathered about them. The stood there unshifting, unmoving, like a black wall that erected itself into the landscape on its own through the power it gained by feeding off of her fear and hatred. The figures only moved for the grandest one of them all, the worst of the worst. The red-eyed, flat nosed, corpse-skinned lord of the damned.

He walked through the crowd and up to her with confidence and grace that made her ill again. If she'd had anything left in her, she would've puked it up again. She grew more and more frenzied as he drew closer. Here he was, the creature that had murdered her best friends and countless others, that tore Harry off the Marauders Map forever. She was sure she was about to join him, that she and her muddy blood were about to be erased off of his perfect, twisted nightmare of a kingdom, too.

Her sobs and cries grew to shrill unbridled screams as he knelt beside her and ran a disgusting, bony hand over her blood, puke, and rain drenched hair. His smile was absolutely bone grinding. He was saying something to her, and the words reverberated through her head in a way she couldn't place, but she wasn't hearing him. She refused to listen to the voice of the thing that ruined her life and destroyed her home, that killed everyone she'd ever cared about. She watched his lips move over jagged, rotting teeth, watched as his red eyes twinkled in delight at her despair… And then she saw nothing, and she embraced the idea that she might be dead. For this world and the awful people who remained to inhabit it, they were something she was sure she could never survive. Not anymore.

But she wasn't dead, no matter how much she wanted to be. She hadn't been granted that mercy. The next time her eyes had opened, she found herself suspended from the ceiling of the remains of the Great Hall by magical ropes that she could feel digging into her wrists even though she couldn't see them. To her left and right hung many others. They too were as helpless as lambs being dangled over the heads of starving wolves who roamed just below. She could see them, too, those black-clothed wolves. At the head of the room, where Dumbledore had once stood, was their cunning alpha- Sporting a mad man's grin and all.

This was how she learned that Luna, Neville, Ginny, George, and Professor McGonagall were still alive. Of her those hanging around her, they were the only names she truly cared about when they were called. Most of the others were only people she'd met once, had heard about, or had passed in the hall. She took their names with both happiness and despair. Happiness because they were alive… And despair because after all of this pain and suffering, after surviving the horrors of war- They were nothing but prizes for the enemy.

Luna was given to Dolohov.

George to the Carrows.

Like some sick joke Neville was handed over to Bellatrix.

McGonagall to Yaxley.

And, to her surprise, Ginny was given to Snape. Snape who was supposed to be dead. Snape who had supposedly been on their side all along. Snape who stood there as a sobbing Ginny was lowered to the floor before him.

Hermione, too, began to cry as she learned of her fate. Gifted to none other than Lucius Malfoy.

She remembered, through the tears, the sight of him as she was lowered from the ceiling, wrists drawn above her head. She was dangled right in his face yet he wouldn't look her in the eye. His gaze was locked elsewhere, somewhere far from the Great Hall, some place unreachable. She wished she was there.

Anywhere but here.

Now she stood in the third floor hall of Malfoy Manor, cleaning for guests that would never come.