A/N: Warning! This story contains references to mental illness, alcoholism, loss and grief, strong language and sexual themes. Mature Content.

This was originally going to be written as a one-shot that then turned into a four-chapter story. Now I have more chapters planned and will just see where the story takes me. I was inspired to write this after listening to (for the millionth time because I love it) the song The Sharpest Lives by My Chemical Romance. I would highly recommend giving it a listen before reading this story to get a grasp for the themes and my headspace whilst writing this.

This is a dark story so please be aware before you start reading. This is a different kind of Hermione and Draco who've been wracked and ruined by the Second Wizarding War.

No copyright intended.

I hope you enjoy it. Please let me know what you think in the comments!

Love

Ivy x

Chapter 1

Her eyes burned.

They weren't sore anymore. They stopped being sore months ago. Now they were only red and swollen and begged to be closed every second of her waking life. With each tick of the clock, each cycle of the moon, each rise and fall of the sun brought with them only more pain buried deep within her soul and always at the edge of her lips was a scream.

Coffee did nothing to ease the ache that accompanied the act of holding her eyelids apart or allowed even a temporary strength to flow through her exhausted mind. A good nights sleep was a heavenly daydream long forgotten and her body fought through every potion she tried to bribe it with to reach that bliss of uninterrupted slumber. Of a second not seeing their faces as they died behind her closed lids. Nothing worked to fight the screaming in her head. Both her voice and that of others plagued her, drowned her and terrified her.

The sounds of her sobs for many friends gone missing, departed and deranged filled the four walls of her cramped studio apartment. Dust and despair clinged to the walls that closed her in, trapped her in her head. The darkness that fell each day left a bittersweet taste on her tongue. In darkness she found solace from the dragging day yet in that pitch lay a dead body at her feet instead of a lump in her rug that her tired eyes disallowed her to see clearly.

The thoughts of happier times were even more destroying than those of the war and Hermione had been alone with them for far too long. Too long without a comforting hand to rest on hers or another with a matching torture to offer to dry her tears.

At work, the only thing filling her days, she'd watch the people unaffected by war go about their lives with no bother. They'd laugh together and look at her with only pity on their faces before commencing their whispers and offering a sympathetic glance her way. That was the only sentiment she felt from another human being anymore. Pity. Such an ugly word that goes no where. Far too often she'd find herself burying her head in her hands at her desk to avoid seeing it again and again. She had it memorised by now. Could notice it from across the corridor in the face of a stranger. Saw it in the way their brow furrowed before even looking at her. As if her sadness penetrated their periphery and interrupted their perfectly rested lives.

On a particularly dreary Thursday in late October, she sat at the same desk she had for the last year. She read and reread the same sentence of the report she had yet to file to her supervisor. It was titled 'The Repercussions of The Second Wizarding War on the Education of First Year Witches and Wizards'. Though, at one time or another, the topic would have been one of great significance to Hermione, she increasingly found herself unable to focus herself on it. Only bringing her more shame that she hadn't been able to help those she'd studied and interviewed. If she had filed this six months ago, there may have been a scheme in place by now to resolve, in part, the effects the torture inflicted by the Carrows had on those children. Children who were only 11 years old at the time.

The interviews she conducted with those children, many of whom were required to be submitted to St. Mungo's for an intense session of therapy, were heartbreaking and added to her overwhelming sense of failure. Too many would stare at a spot beyond her shoulder, hearing but not seeing her as if she were a figment of their imagination too dangerous to look upon. As if their eyes might start to burn too if they did. Perhaps they saw visions the same as her, she'd think. Maybe she's not too dissimilar from these broken children. Forced to grow up much earlier than she should have. Forced to try to fix all that fell apart around her until her battery ran dry, unable to again be filled, yet forced to go on.

She sat, head in her hands, staring at the words 'irreversible damage' and pondered on what they meant until she concluded they weren't words at all. Just funny marks on a page that one time or another, a person must have given meaning to though she couldn't quite remember what.

Tearing her eyes away from the page was a difficult thing to do. Every twitch of the tight muscles behind them to drag the orbs in a different direction seared her mind once more. She couldn't escape the hubbub of noise surrounding her, locking her in place, making her want to scream out and tell all of the strangers around her to shut the fuck up. Not one face was a friendly one or one she'd rip out her lungs to see even for a second. Not one had held her hand during the hard times or made her smile on cold Christmas mornings so many years ago. None contained his bright smile, her kind eyes or his famous scar. All may as well have been blank pages, ghostly and bare. Nothing was there for her. These weren't her people and nor did she belong to them.

She couldn't remember the last time her mouth turned upwards in the way of a smile. She supposed it must have been before Dumbledore's death. Over a talk about first kisses in a warm, red and gold sitting room with two familiar faces. Before her world fell apart and everyone she loved quickly left her. Even those she thought she'd never have to say goodbye to. It was impossible now she concluded. Never again would she feel a butterfly in her stomach for they were all dead, singed by the alcohol she hoped would distract her mind from it's own torment.

Alas the warm burn of the fire whisky that had become her only bed companion might feel sweet on an evening but it now, in the light of day, stung her brain like it was attempting to bang and knock at her skull in an attempt to rival Houdini. Though at least she was feeling something. For too long before she turned to drink, the numbness had been insufferable. It sat patiently waiting her out, knowing she'd break before it did. The monotony of that invisible pain was invariably more toxic than the one trying to punish her failure today. The feeling, though only minutely, did detract from the ongoing memory upheaval her mind just loved to throw at her.

As she sat, waiting for the day to end so that she could wrap her lips once more around the bottle of the amber liquid, she faintly heard a voice she'd known from before. One that she thought had also been snuffed from the world. One she thought for a second might just be a vivid hallucination. Checking to see if she was wrong which, even in her state, rarely happened, she determined quite to her surprise that she was in fact incorrect. The voice belonged to a man that had for a time been a source of discomfort and displeasure to her. Yet it didn't stop her from wanting to reach out and grab this man and bring him into her life again. Any breath of a life she once had would soothe her somewhat no matter how unpleasant he may have been when he was part of it. This man was once a boy who grew up in the same halls and traipsed the same grounds as she. Though their worlds were galaxies apart, he must have the same memory, the same knowledge of a time lost and that was enough for her.

Her feet began to push from the floor, bringing her body from the chair she had all but moulded herself into, and moved one in front of the other to look upon the interruption to her misery. To view this person she once knew in the hope that they might be someone she could invite back into her life, even for a minute.

His feet by comparison moved swiftly across the shiny marble tile of the Ministry atrium as two large men dragged him along, their hands firmly tightened around his arms. Wherever he was going, he wasn't going willingly, she noted.

She took a moment to look at him, trying to recognise him for the boy he was but struggled. This man looked nothing like him apart from the white of his hair. It now lay long in a centre parting to the nape of his neck save for the sides that were shaved short, exhibiting an array of black tattoos that wrapped around his head and neck. Lowering her gaze, she noticed them on his hands and could only presume that they spread over his entire body. He wore fairly smart clothes considering the rest of his appearance though his shirt was unironed. A peculiar detail but one worth remembering all the same. A picture formed in her head of a man with a story that was as yet untold. One that she had not yet read but wished to.

She continued walking, almost into his path, as her curiosity grew. He only spotted her staring at him after he had already passed her but found enough energy from somewhere to drag himself out of the brutish men's grasp. He took a second glance over his shoulder to make sure it was her, turned against himself to storm in her direction and pushed his face up to her. An inch further and his nose would have brushed hers but she didn't flinch. What could this man do that her own mind hadn't already? His tall frame loomed over her, his chest rose and fell quickly and she could only make out a few words that escaped his lips through angered breaths as he was dragged away again. 'Filthy eyes' followed by 'off me'. 'Granger' and 'fucking pity'.

Pity. There was that word again. A word so nauseating that she felt the bile rise in her throat as she heard it float from his lips in a cracked, strained voice.

It all happened so quickly that she hadn't noticed the droplets of spit on her face from his outburst until after he had disappeared down the elevator. The brute's hands were latched painfully on his shoulders as he sneered at her from afar, waiting for the lift to move. She brought the sleeve of her cardigan to her face to wipe the saliva away before looking down at the damp, darkened strands of wool against her hands. It shone under the bright lights of the atrium and, with that sparkling reminder of a time where things were different, she found a thimble of strength to speak.

"Where are they taking him?" She croaked to nobody in particular, only those stood around watching him move further away from her, hoping someone would satisfy her nosiness.

"To trial. Hope he gets sent down an' all" A man huffed at her in answer.

She turned on her heel back to her desk, deposited the papers of the report she clung to her chest having only just remembered she was holding them and made her way downstairs. As she descended in the elevator that took all too long to get moving, she looked again at her wet sleeve and remembered his taunting words. A memory of him uttering one disgusting prejudiced name raised her heart rate, flushed her cheeks and ensured her anger. A flicker of someone she used to be glossed past her senses and an indescribable rage flew through her from her fingertips to her toes, warming her skin. The man that the shine on her woollen sleeve belonged to had been the sole cause of her misery up to the time the Earth stopped turning. This was the same man that breathed fire into her cold bones again and awoke a swotty, argumentative girl from her slumber.

She didn't know nor did she care how he was alive. Just that he was.

Reaching the courtrooms of the lower levels, she heard his obnoxious kicking and screaming again and followed in his wake with unfinished business.

The brutes stopped him in front of a set of large oaken doors leading him to what he seemed to consider his doom when he saw her again, standing directly opposite him down the empty hallway.

A familiar sneer formed on his lips that she'd seen all too often before but had become a stranger to since.

As he was pulled into the dark room where his fate would be sealed, he stuck the middle finger of his right hand up in her direction, straining against the cuffs around his wrists. She was too slow to respond. The shock of the events over the last few minutes had slowed her reactions so he didn't see it before he was pulled away from her. The door shut with a slam behind him and her lips began to turn upwards at the corners, her cheeks pushed higher and her chin pinched together to create the first smile she'd worn in years.

Draco Malfoy would see her again and she vowed that he wouldn't like it when he did.