A/N: See? I told you this story wasn't abandoned! I didn't realise it's been over 7 months since I updated and I'm truly sorry for the excruciating wait. I put an explanation at the end, if you're interested. Otherwise, read on, and please heed the trigger warnings for this chapter as it is rather intense.

Trigger warnings: Dissociation, mild self-harm, suicidal ideation, self-loathing, flashbacks, torture, sexual assault, suicidal intent

It took a while for Hermione to realise she was awake again. Consciousness didn't feel terribly different from unconsciousness, after all. She kept her eyes closed and hoped that she would fall back asleep soon. Sentience was just too tedious.

But trying to fall asleep only seemed to wake her more and she slowly became aware of pestering sensations. Her legs lay curled beside each other. The soft fabric of her clothes lingered against her skin; the blankets and pillows around her all gently pushed and pulled at her body. Noises wandered by.

It was too much.

She wanted everything to stop. Like an itch just out of reach, there was a deep sense of discomfort crawling under her skin. Nothing was right. She didn't even want it to be. She just wanted nothingness.

She sensed Narcissa move near and crouch beside her head. Hermione's body went into overdrive, begging her to stand up and not waste all this energy streaming through her blood. Hermione refused, stubbornly keeping her eyes shut and trying to force herself back to sleep even as Narcissa's fingers began softly probing through her hair.

"Hermione."

Her voice was so soft that Hermione couldn't understand how it sent adrenaline pulsing through her limbs instead of easing her back to unconsciousness.

"Are you unwell? You've been asleep for nearly fifteen hours."

Hermione wondered how much of that had been actual sleep.

She gave in and made a soft sound of acknowledgement to prove she was awake. Narcissa's relief was immediately apparent and Hermione suddenly found arms firmly wrapped around her shoulders, hoisting her into a sitting position.

She wished Narcissa would just leave her be.

"Are you ill? Come and eat a little."

"No," Hermione squirmed out of Narcissa's grasp and curled up on the pillows again. "I'm not hungry. I want to sleep." But she had never been more awake in her life and it irritated her to no end.

Narcissa reached a hand toward Hermione's forehead as though to test her temperature and Hermione swatted it away. Without looking, Hermione knew Narcissa was shocked and at least a little bit offended. Good. The terrible, bitter voice in Hermione's head hoped that that would keep the woman away and leave her to rot in her misery.

"Are you sure you aren't unwell? Let me—"

A slight stinging on her head—behind Hermione's left ear—and suddenly her heart launched into her throat and all hell broke loose within her nerve endings.

Every possible emotion rode wildly through her bloodstream, a hurricane which tore apart each vein and was surely trying to claw its way out of her body.

She screamed and the feeling of it tearing through her larynx only invited a new onslaught of whirling images and sensations.

There was hair pulling—not like the bullying from boys at her primary school, but a kind of primal ripping through her head—she thought there was blood—it burned—

But that wasn't as bad as the other things, the ugly voices around her which cackled and screeched and the coolness of that blade twirling lightly along her skin, mocking the blood vessels pulsing frantically beneath and all the other invisible monsters which mischievously snaked around her neck, covered her eyes, lingering there just long enough to let her hope for reprieve before beginning their assault and they burned, too—

Hermione didn't know how long the pain continued for, couldn't measure it if she tried. Eventually, it passed, kind of, and she vaguely knew that her surroundings were unchanged and that Narcissa was sitting by her head and looking at her with the most fearful concern Hermione had seen.

"Hermione?" she murmured and Hermione's gaze crept up to meet Narcissa's. "M-my apologies. I think I pulled your hair a little—accidentally—when I moved." Her voice was so soft, like she feared that loud noises might make Hermione transform back into that shrieking, cowering thing. "What is wrong? Have you been cursed?"

Hermione paused, then shook her head. Tried to focus on breathing. It was hard. Her legs, she noticed, felt almost as if they were buzzing.

She sat up so quickly that her head nearly collided with Narcissa's. She needed space, air, room, something that was not this.

Her legs wobbled when she tried to stand on them so she allowed Narcissa's help, trying her hardest to ignore the way flesh on her flesh felt like a burn and amplified the memories (could such awful things truly be memories and not nightmares?) echoing in her head.

Reality took on that curious haziness again. Rationally, she knew it was there, this was real, but it felt utterly intangible.

And perhaps most strangely of all was the constant… nothingness.

She had been flooded with sadness before. Happiness, too. Had been nearly suffocated with fear and utterly saturated with anxiety.

Now, she drowned in nothing. It was the purest form of apathy Hermione could imagine. Just empty.

She sat on a chair now and Narcissa brewed her a cup of tea. The rough texture of the canvas seat aggravated her hands and pressed against the backs of her legs and somehow it was too much again; it invaded the hollow space in her head and Hermione wanted it to stop.

A cup. It took Hermione a moment to remember to reach for it and when it seared her fingertips she didn't even flinch. The pain stung, pried at her skin, but Hermione revelled in it. It was neat and precise, not like the vague laziness of other sensations. As long as her hand burned, she felt real, connected to the world.

She drank and let the boiling tea flow over her tongue until its surface felt rough and tasteless, the buds all burnt.

"Are you sure you're well?" Narcissa took the cup away when Hermione finished and she frowned, feeling herself drift away again. She made fists in her lap and pressed her nails as hard as she could into the palm of her hand and sighed contentedly at the sting it brought. She remembered she had done this when they first apparated away from the manor and wondered why she had stopped. Perhaps she wouldn't have deteriorated this far if she'd had that constant bite to keep her steady, to focus on through all the haze.

Hermione tried to eat the bread Narcissa handed her but it took so much energy to move her mouth, the freshly burned flesh of her tongue hesitant to flex, and she really wasn't hungry. The feel of the dough in her hand as she tugged it apart was exactly like the dozens of times she'd teased her food in her cell and suddenly it was all too much again and she just stood up and went outside.

The cold on her bottom as she sat on the ground was a different kind of pain, the kind that was just uncomfortable enough to make her aware of her body and that was worse, so much worse. When Narcissa quickly followed her outside with a blanket, Hermione didn't want to so much as breathe because then she would have to feel her torso expand and that was hell because she vividly remembered every spot, every rib, every tendon that had been kicked and bruised and broken and healed and then broken again under expensive black boots and abrasive shouts of triumph.

Hermione didn't breathe and part of her hoped that maybe she would pass out and she wouldn't have to deal with the chore of being conscious. But then Narcissa was asking her if she was alright again and Hermione couldn't very well faint without complicating the matter so she inhaled and felt her vision grow cloudy as the memories rolled in.

"I'm fine, I'm sorry, I promise. I just—need some space, I think. And rest. I'll be better soon." Hermione could barely hear her own voice.

Narcissa seemed satisfied, though, and a minute later she brought Hermine the radio and notebook with a little encouraging smile. Hermione mimicked it to the best of her ability and tried not to startle when Narcissa stroked her temple.

Then Hermione sat alone again.

She reminded herself to keep breathing and didn't dare move, even when her leg began to feel numb, even when she got an itch on her cheek. Her breaths grew became shallow until the rise and fall of her chest was barely visible yet while her body grew stiller, her mind accelerated, the magnitude of broken thoughts swelling and cresting and then violently tearing each other apart, flinging themselves across her skull.

She'd never be able to look at a galleon again. Not after they'd carefully squeezed that information out of her, strategically offering it as a relatively harmless key to conclude a brutal casting of Cruciatus.

Voices crawled into her ear, unbidden and incongruent with the serenity of the forest.

"Fifth year—Dumbledore's Army. How did you do it? How did you worm around under the ministry's nose?" It had seemed like such a simple question, and it couldn't hurt anyone now. That had been years ago. It didn't matter anymore.

Being able to breathe mattered, even if she was lying in her own urine in a dungeon.

"Gal-galleons," she had gasped, somehow, as her jaw trembled violently and she wondered if it was possible to go into cardiac arrest at the age of eighteen.

And it had stopped. The wands lowered. Someone might have even cast a charitable Scourgify on her soiled clothes.

"Yes, that's it…" It was like cooing to a child, coaxing them into admitting a wrongdoing. "What do you mean by 'galleons?' Did you bribe someone?"

Hermione couldn't remember whose voice had interrogated her. It wasn't a Death Eater commonly known to the public, she suspected. Perhaps because they were so efficient at information extraction and interrogation that they were better kept tending to prisoners rather than participating in raids and attacks.

It was a rather useless flash of logic.

"Protean Charm."

Her voice sounded foreign in her mouth and she still couldn't see anything but inky darkness. She assumed her captors could, though, because they knew exactly where her ear was when they brought their lips to it and murmured, "And you cast that spell on your own, did you? Only a fifth year? Such a clever girl…"

They didn't really think that, of course. They thought she was no better than a slave, undeserving of magic or praise. But it was so tempting. They had done their research well; they knew validation was her weakness. Approval. And they were giving it to her, false though it may be, and after so much fear and pain, the slight glimmer of praise eased the shame which accompanied confession.

Now, the sweetness had faded and the bitter aftertaste made Hermione want to retch. She utterly disgusted herself and almost wished she had eaten enough to vomit. The burn in her gullet would be an inadequate punishment but it would be something, at least…

Her nails sank into the flesh of her palm and the stinging felt like a singing beacon she could tune into.

They had left her then, after extracting that first admission. She was pretty sure she'd blacked out before they even departed her cell. It hadn't taken long for the passing of time to shift, warp itself into a wholly different unit of measurement. Rather than the metric evenness of seconds, minutes, hours; Hermione's existence functioned as a matter of flickers of sleep; expansive, twisting, infinite tunnels of agony and fear which snapped back into brief flashes of jagged memory as soon as she lay alone on the damp stone again. A month she had been there, sealed away in cool darkness, but she could not even hope to guess at how many hours of each day she had spent asleep, or awake, or in the in-between state which made up interrogations.

And now it was done, somehow. Never again would she endure what she had. Surely if they captured her again, they wouldn't bother to keep her alive for a second round. She'd nothing left to make her existence worth their while. Her death, on the other hand, was plenty rich.

She imagined that her psyche had provided a puzzle for those among her captors who bothered themselves with such things. What were the curses, the taunts that would make her break?

They had been fond of humiliation. They thought it suited her, the prideful girl who dared to flaunt her stolen magic, dared to even populate a world she did not deserve. Hermione had grown used to years of jeers and insults, though, and it was easy to tune out their voices. She would rather listen to hours of their sneers than be at the receiving end of a malicious wand.

Perhaps her mistake lay there. Had she let them believe their words inflicted as much pain as their bruises, she could have spared herself the rest of it. Instead, she had proudly broadcast her indifference, rolled her eyes as they spat slurs into her face.

Idiot, stupid… Hermione pinched the flesh of her cheek between her incisors and screamed at herself. Why had she not seen it? What kind of self-proclaimed brilliant girl could not see the most obvious strategy? She had clung to her pride, instead, as though it was as effective a weapon as the knives they wielded. Her pride was worthless, and now everything else was, too.

They had taken her challenge with greed. Cruciatus made her scream, but what would make her talk?

They had tried physical humiliation instead. They had taken a liking to the Imperius, especially. It was hard to sit there and glare at her tormentors with cool disdain after they had seized her dignity, the twirls of their wands bending her like strings of a marionette. Despite all her stubborn defiance, she'd never been terribly good at fighting off that particular Unforgivable, and it had been so nice to be snatched away by that serene cloud of obedience. Yes, of course I'll stand up… Everything is right, is good… I'll walk over here… Sink to my knees... Undo your trousers…

They had released her suddenly and she found herself choking on hot flesh. She had tried to pull away and was kicked onto the floor, still spluttering, laughter beating her ears. Hadn't moved. Stayed there, curled up with her eyes wide and saliva she refused to swallow dribbling over her lips.

Perhaps this had excited them, made them hope they'd finally gotten to her. Hermione couldn't remember anything outside the hyperawareness of her own mouth, the way her jaw had ached a little and her tongue had twitched. Rather than pull her secrets out, the degradation only forced her into the deepest part of herself.

So then they had moved on, apparently convinced that their more brutal repertoire wouldn't destroy her beyond her capacity for usefulness.

While it was true she didn't have much sense of time, it didn't seem like it had taken much longer for them to work that first confession from her. After that, the rest came so much easier. When they wanted information, they tortured her with finesse, learned what spells and strikes made her beg for it to end and what shut her down into silence. Like fight or flight, Hermione had developed a new self-preservation reflex: tell them what they want. Almost as effective as the Imperius.

Towards the end, their treatment of her had lost its strategy. It became recreation, and she saw more and more of Lestrange than she did her interrogators. She had exhausted her usefulness.

Because she had told them everything. Members of the Order. How they had broken into the Ministry. She had even tried, desperately, to reveal the location of Grimmauld Place and they had only stopped this line of questioning when it became apparent that no amount of threatening would stop her tongue from rolling in on itself as she tried to iterate the address.

The only reason she hadn't told them about Horcruxes was because they hadn't thought to ask.

They didn't bother to tell her how they used the information she provided, or whether any of it had truly been news to them at all. Surely they already had a sense of who was loyal to the Order, and recounting how they'd escaped Death Eaters on the run was hardly useful after the fact.

Still, this didn't ease the disgust and shame Hermione felt for herself. She had ratted out her friends and their secrets, had done so with eagerness. She ought not even return to them. They were better off without her.

It had begun to rain. Droplets landed on Hermione's hands and face like blades of ice. She felt it seep through her pores and saturate her bones, freezing her from her marrow outwards.

How long would it take for that freezing to become irreversible? Once hypothermia struck, death could come within minutes. But it wasn't cold or wet enough, at least not yet. She would have to stay awhile longer…

In her fourth year, when the Unforgivables had been performed without shame for their supposed education, Hermione had resisted the slight nausea and bravely asked whether the Killing Curse could be used on oneself. In theory, the answer was yes, but there had never been a proven instance of a wizard successfully doing so. The amount of will it would take to turn one's own magic against oneself in such a manner was staggering, of quite literally mythical proportions.

She had not slept well after completing that research. The information had receded back into her mind, but now it slithered forth, pressing her wand more firmly against her thigh as it lay restless beside her. So near to her hand.

They said it was painless.

She had seen it, even. Sirius had seemed merely taken aback when the spell met him. In an instant, he was gone. Nudged quietly out of existence. Done. No more.

She did not deserve something so easy.

A rustling behind her, and Hermione desperately wished for Narcissa to stay away, to leave her to her self-destruction.

She had no such luck.

"Hermione?"

Her eyes remained blankly staring at the ground ahead of her. Rain pooled in the crevices of rocks and branches.

"Hermione, come inside, you'll catch cold."

Good.

A hand crept over Hermione's shoulder and she tried to will it away.

"Hermione, speak to me."

She made an unintelligible whine and squirmed away from her touch, firmly overruling the small fraction of herself which wanted desperately to crawl into Narcissa's arms.

Hermione could sense the woman's frustration growing by the second, and her own panic mounted at the thought of how she might respond.

"You're soaked through. It's warm inside."

Hermione's lips pressed together.

"Don't be foolish—you'll die out here!"

"Good!"

The silence that followed Hermione's shout was not the soothing blankness of before but rather a ferocious vacuum that she longed to fill with some sort of justification, but she had none to offer. In her mind, she could see Narcissa's eyes widening in shock, narrowing in anger, or perhaps worst of all, rolling in exasperated dismissal.

She had no way to measure the woman's true reaction until she spoke, completely neutral: "You don't mean that."

Immediately, Hermione bristled in response. How dare anyone tell her how to feel?

She squirmed away from Narcissa's hand when it reached out to offer comfort. It made her want to snatch up her wand and do the deed right then, just to prove that she could.

Her hand crept forwards to where her wand lay, testing her resolve, but froze when her fingers met empty air. Her eyes slowly followed, carefully looking only at the ground. She saw a pale hand a few inches away from her own, the wand she sought loosely held in long fingers.

Without explanation, Hermione felt tears flood her eyes.

"Give me my wand." Her voice sounded pathetic and hoarse and she hated it, hated herself so much.

"I cannot do that, not if you will try to use it to harm yourself."

Hermione inhaled, preparing to demand her wand back, but she couldn't find the energy. Deep down, she knew Narcissa was right, and her own pitiful voice echoed through her head, Can't even have a wand… so worthless… they're right, you don't deserve anything, none of it…

"Come now; come inside." Narcissa stood and reached down to help Hermione to her feet. With every gentle word and touch, Hermione felt herself inching closer to whatever spectacular self-destruction awaited her. She almost wished Narcissa would fight her instead; anger would be preferable to this unbearable, fracturing grief.

Fingers wrapped around Hermione's upper arms. "Up you get."

"No…"

"You can do it. We need to get you out of the cold."

Hermione was shivering something shocking, but she revelled in the agony of it, hoped it would take her out as effectively as an Unforgivable.

But she had no strength left to fight as Narcissa easily dragged her to her feet and guided her inside. Hermione closed her eyes as she sank down into cushions. Blankets were wrapped around her shoulders. A bottle pressed against her lips and her body dutifully swallowed the warm potion within, greedily soaking up the heat and going about its business and repairing any damage. Hermione hated it for working so hard to keep her alive when she didn't want it, wished she could just instruct her heart to cease its beating as easily as she might lift her leg or clench her fist.

She tried, directed all her thoughts at the hollow space behind her sternum, wiling it to slow, to still.

It defiantly maintained its steady rhythm and each clench of a ventricle felt like a strike against her.

Without warning, she was pulled into gentle arms, her head directed to rest beneath the firm ridge of a collarbone. Something dabbed at her cheeks, and Hermione realised tears were dribbling from her eyes.

"Shh, it's alright. You're safe now. This will pass…"

Hermione wished she could tell Narcissa that it didn't matter, that she didn't want it to get better. Her eyes pinched shut even harder and she tried to ignore the soft voice which drifted through her magically dried hair.

"You've done so well. Truly. Far braver and stronger than anyone… This will all be over soon, I promise. You mustn't give up, not when we're so close, now…"

Hermione wished she could block her hearing as easily as she could her sight.

"Think of your friends, how much they need you."

Hermione couldn't help it: a strangled whimper escaped and Narcissa gripped her more tightly.

"I need you, too. I'd not be here if not for you. Please don't leave me now."

A violent sob tore its way from Hermione's throat and she couldn't hold back the rest that followed. They ripped her apart from the inside out and if not for Narcissa's arms around her she felt certain she would have come apart then, decimated beyond hope of repair.

The sobs went on impossibly long. Hermione's mind and body were so disjointed from one another that while all she wanted was reprieve, her lungs would not cease their gasping, not even for a moment. It seemed to last forever; her hair was soaked again, this time from tears, and her diaphragm seized so ferociously she was sure she could not breathe.

Another potion was summoned and pressed to her lips and Hermione gulped it down, choked when her lungs insisted on swallowing some too.

And then her bones melted and she was gone.

A/N: This chapter was started in January and finished today. It took so long to get out partly because I've had a busy year, and also I didn't trust myself to write it well. There have been so many times over the months where I've written the whole thing in my head but I couldn't bear to actually put it on paper in case it wasn't perfect. I wrote the last quarter in a sudden burst at a cafe today and I think I'm rather satisfied. Relieved it's over with, at least. Now that this is done, hopefully the rest will come easier. (At least the next wait should be less than 7 months. That's just cruel.)

Reminder that while my chapters may be inconsistent, I'm always writing updates on my tumblr and very chatty if you have questions, critiques or just want to say hi: 16-pennies dot tumblr dot com