Hey everyone. So um...this is my first time writing fanfiction in a while, so I apologize if my writing is a bit rusty. I'm temporarily coming out of retirement because I started watching Victorious episodes one day and I realized that I wanted to write again. And since I'm hopelessly stuck on my original story and I couldn't think of anything to add to my existing fanfictions...I decided to start a new one. And for those of you who have known my style of writing for a while...this is a drastic change from what I used to write. It takes place in the Victorious world but it is also a bit AU as well. Yes, there will be Cabbie fluff, but it'll be more emotional and dark than the majority of my other stories were. And for those of you who are emotionally triggered by stories about sexual assault, you may not want to read this. This is my first M-rated story, too, and there is good reason for why it is rated that way. Hope you enjoy it despite the dark stuff!

Narrator's POV

"Everyone makes mistakes, Cat, and the majority of them are forgivable. It's what we learn from them that counts."

It was something her father used to say to her every time she got herself into some sort of trouble. His soothing words comforted her when she spilled grape juice on her mom's new sofa when she was seven years old, they echoed in her head when she accidentally waxed her friend Jade's eyebrows off her junior year of high school, and they were certainly seared into her brain now. Only this time, she just couldn't accept her father's words. Not with a mistake as fatal and life-altering as this one.

If she just hadn't gone to that frat party with him, she wouldn't be in the position that she is right now: dripping wet, quaking with fear, wandering aimlessly around a college campus that wasn't her own. If she had just agreed to go see that new rom-com with her best friend Molly instead of focusing so much on fitting in someplace where she knew she didn't quite belong, her life wouldn't currently be crumbling around her. There were so many other paths that she could've taken in her life that fateful day that she couldn't see how she could possibly forgive herself for making all the wrong decisions.

This mistake wasn't forgivable; it was a constant spiral downwards into a dark abyss of no return. She couldn't see the light, the walls of the abyss seemed impossible to surpass, and she couldn't get herself out no matter how much she tried. And every attempt she made to heal, to move on and forget the terrible ordeal ever happened, just made things such much worse.

How could she learn from her blunder if she was so hopelessly, completely stuck like this?

Of course she was learning valuable lessons from being in this predicament, but there was one trap that the poor, selfless young woman could not avoid: self-blame.

She was the victim. And it wasn't her fault.

"Oh my god, Cat, that dress looks so great on you!"

Cat turned around to pose for her sorority sisters, the ones who had convinced her to come to the party with them, showing off a tightly-fitted purple dress that accentuated every nook, cranny, and curve on her body. The fabric ended just above the kneecaps- not too short but just short enough to scream "sexy and confident." Her toned, tan legs were further showcased by a pair of purple sparkly heels. She looked at the awed faces in front of her and made her decision: she was definitely buying this dress, no matter how many months of work study it took to pay her father back for it.

A light shade of red entered her cheeks and she giggled. "Thanks! Do you think Tyler will like it?"

Serene, the leader of the Phi Beta Kappa sorority house, smiled brightly and nodded in agreement. "Kitty, when he sees you in this dress tonight, he won't be able to take his eyes or his hands-" She winked coyly after the word hands "-off of you."

The nickname Serene had given her when she first joined the sorority last year tugged on a long-forgotten heart string as she briefly remembered a time when someone else used to call her that.

"Yeah Cat, you look super hot!" a perky brunette named Kathy chirped from Serene's side.

The other girl, most of them dressed in light, cheery colors, started to chatter in their excitement until Serene stopped them with a stern look. "Now let's get you out of that dress and into the nail salon so we can fix those disastrous cuticles of yours."

She started to shoo Cat back to her dressing room but paused when she saw that Cat's smile had disappeared. "I'm kidding, silly!" she exclaimed, touching Cat's arm gently. "Learn to take a joke."

Cat sighed and walked back to her dressing room, the excitement about the new dress suddenly gone like it had vanished into thin air. Sure, she couldn't always understand jokes because she thought of everything so literally, but even she could tell that Serene was just being mean. And unfortunately, this was far from the first time her supposed "role model" had treated her in this manner.

She slipped out of the dress, hung it back on the hangar that it was on when she had first found it in the store, and looked at herself in the mirror. She saw her petite yet mature figure in a blue, incredibly lacy leopard print push-up bra (it must've made her boobs look at least two sizes larger than usual) and a thin matching thong. Of course she always grimaced at the usual things girls complain about when they look in a mirror- the thighs that should be thinner than they are, the stomach that just isn't toned enough, and love handles that just wouldn't go away- but this time was a bit different.

The whole mature, popular girl act that being a successful sorority entailed, pretending to be a girl who gossiped about others behind their backs and who went to parties just to get wasted enough not to remember the good time she had while she was there...

It just wasn't her. Or who she used to be, anyway.

Later on that night, she sat with the same group of girls (albeit a bit smaller than it was at the mall) on black leather couches with a cup of god-knows-what in her hand. Was is vodka? Tequila? Or was it that fancy fruit punch the frat boys had put in a glass bowl and ladled out in cups for the other partiers to drink? She could never tell; for some reason, it all seemed to taste the same to her. Plus, this was something Tyler, her boyfriend of two months, had given her shortly after they arrived at the party. He said it would help her loosen up a bit. How could she say no to someone who cared for her partying experience like that? By now he knew what made her stubborn and uptight and what made her relax and have a good time. He just understood her so well...well, the kind of girl she was pretending to be, at least.

He was traveling back and forth between his friends and Cat, who was dancing and talking eagerly to her girls as Tyler kept refilling her cup with alcohol. It wasn't long before Cat started to get woozy and disoriented. Their faces became blurred in her mind and she laughed uncontrollably at everything they said. Matter of fact, it probably wouldn't have mattered what the conversation was about because by now all of the girls had had enough alcohol to last them the whole night.

As boyfriend after boyfriend came to retrieve their partners to grind, make-out, and hook up with them, Tyler snuck up behind Cat and wrapped his arms around her waist. "Hey baby," he murmured, planting a couple of gentle kisses on the side of her neck. "Care to go someplace a little more quiet for a bit?"

Cat couldn't quite understand what he was saying, but it was Tyler, for crying out loud. He was probably saying something that would normally make her feel on top of the world. "Sureeeee" She dragged the word out and kissed him forcibly on the lips. "Lesgo make some memoriiies."

He smiled and took her hand, leading her through the masses of gyrating, boisterous students with full drinks in their hands. At this point, the chaos and the bright lights were confusing her and she stumbled a bit on the stairs, but Tyler helped her navigate the wooden steps, eventually picking her up and carrying her to a small bedroom when he realized that she wasn't able to walk by herself.

It was very dark in the room when Tyler plopped her down on the queen-sized bed. She laughed vibrantly at this. "Tylerrrr, why 'sit so dark in here?"

Although the majority of her senses were not so perceptive at the time, her ears still heard things loud and clear: the scuffling of multiple pairs of shoes, not just of Tyler's black high tops.

They weren't alone in the room.

Before Cat's fuzzy brain had the chance to make sense of any of this, two guys grabbed her arms and another planted his hands firmly on her waist, pinning her to the bed. She squeaked in surprise and kicked her feet wildly, causing another guy to catch them in the air and smash them violently against the bed frame. Then, she felt a pair of hands slipping underneath her dress and she continue to squirm, trying to release herself from her assailants' grasp.

"Let me go! Please! Don't do this!" she screamed in fear, only to be punished with a collective, menacing laugh and a strong punch to her cheek. Because one of the guys was wearing a spiky metal ring, it cut deep into her chin and dug its way to the side of her nose, making her shriek in pain.

"Shaddup, whore, you ain't getting out of this no matter how hard you try!" a guy whose voice sounded vaguely familiar chortled, and Cat soon found another covering her mouth. She tried licking the guy's hand and squirming some more but to no avail: soon, the thong was off and her dress was rolled up to her waist, leaving the bottom half of her completely vulnerabl, making her tremble with fear. The deep gash on her cheek started bleeding heavily, eventually dripping down the side of her face to match the color of her hair below.

An intense ripple of pain seized her body as the gang of five boys, one by one, penetrated her. Whenever something inhibited the guy into getting what he wanted from her, he would insult her and a thick bunch of her hair would get yanked hard. The tears streamed down her face, the salt water and her mascara pooling with the blood below as the pain worsened the more they abused her body. The torture seemed endless.

When the last guy finished up (he actually didn't want to violate her, so the leader made him penetrate her with a beer bottle instead of with his dick), they let go of her and rolled her dress down. The thong, however, was picked up by one of the guys and shoved into his pant pocket. "Hope you had a good time at the party, Cat," he sneered. "See you around." They slowly exited the room, leaving Cat's bruised, exhausted body on the bed.

The last thing that Cat remembered before blacking out that night was the identity of the last guy that spoke before leaving the room.

And from that moment on, Tyler's bitingly sarcastic words would haunt her every night in her sleep.

After sitting behind the wheel of her car and crying for a bit, Cat wiped the tears from her face and crawled out the door, pushing it weakly shut behind her. It was one in the morning on a Sunday night and she could still hear drunk kids returning from parties yelling obscenities to the sky around her, though they were pretty far away. Despite that, she was comforted by the fact that people were still up, out and about- hopefully she could find someone sober to help her before the sun rose.

"Hello?!" she started shouting, pulling a picture up on her PearPhone and holding it up in the air. "Can someone help me? Does anyone know this guy? Anyone?"

She wandered around the unfamiliar campus for about an hour or so, yelling the same thing every few minutes or so. It started raining a couple of minutes into her trek, making her shiver in her tank top and jean capris. Finally, a girl sitting on a bench smoking a cigarette noticed Cat and quickly figured out that she didn't go to her school. "Hey you! Redhead!"

Startled, Cat turned around and saw the girl sitting on the bench. Jet-black hair tickled the sides of her chin and framed her face nicely as she took another puff of her cigarette, the smoke curling up towards the clear night sky. "What are you yammering about so late at night? Are you lost or something?"

Cat's face flushed slightly. "I'm sorry, I've never been here before. I'm looking for someone."

Her companion snuffed out her cigarette and chuckled. "Well, good luck with that. This campus is so big that you're better off finding a needle in a haystack."

"Haystacks have needles in them?" Cat asked, looking confused. "What does that have to do with me finding Robbie?"

Exasperated already with Cat, the girl (probably a senior) rolled her eyes. "No, you dummy, it's just a say-" She stopped abruptly mid-sentence. "Wait a second...kid, I may be able to help you out. I actually do know a guy named Robbie. He lives in the same building as me over there."

She pointed with black acrylic nails in front of her to a six-floor stone building with a miniature clock tower in the middle of it. This fact renewed a sense of hope in Cat and she squealed happily. "Oh my gosh, really? Does he look like this?"

The redhead, now drenched because of the pouring rain, shielded her phone as she showed the girl without a name a picture of Robbie that she had taken last year at his graduation party; he was sitting happily with Rex on a chair, laughing at a joke someone had told him. It was one of her favorite pictures of him because for the first time in his life, it looked like he was truly happy. "Yeah, I know that guy!" the girl exclaimed. "Tall, lanky nerd that is part of the theatre society here. He lives on my floor."

Groaning a bit as she stood up, the girl (who Cat later found out was named Amanda) slipped something into Cat's hand. "This is my room key. Use it to get into the building. Then, when you see Robbie, give it to him and he'll know what to do with it. Got it?"

"Got it!" Cat cried out, jumping up and down a bit. "Thanks!" She quickly hugged the stranger before racing off into the direction of the building.

The strategy worked. Because the person checking people into the dorm was taking a bathroom break, she was able to slip in and travel up six flights of stairs to reach the third floor- Robbie's floor. After wandering down a hallway or two with no luck, she finally took a right turn and stumbled across Robbie's dorm room, Room 319.

It took her a couple of minutes to gain her composure before knocking lightly on his door. She suddenly became incredibly nervous to the point where she started shaking violently- what if he was disgusted by the sight of seeing her again after such a long time? After all, she was the one who started ignoring his text messages and calls in the first place. Or worse yet, what if he didn't recognize her at all? Given how close of friends they were all the way through elementary, middle, and high school, that would break her heart into a million pieces.

She braced herself for his reaction when he opened the door. She grimaced internally at first because she noticed how groggy he was- her knocking must've woke him up from a deep slumber. But after that, she was astounded at what she saw in front of her. The man that stood in front of her was not the boy she had known all of her life.

Robbie, dressed in a white t-shirt and grey boxers, yawned and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes as he opened the door. "Mitch, seriously? This is the second time this has happened today..." His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open in shock as he realized that it wasn't Mitch standing in front of him...the dripping, shaking feminine figure was a reminder of his past. A past he had hoped to forget and let it stay forgotten.

There's no way...I must be dreaming. How...why is she here?

In that moment, he could only get four words out of his dumbfounded mouth: "Oh my god...Cat?"

So that's the beginning. For those of you who may have been confused, I write flashbacks in Italics. I got the inspiration for this story after reading a horrific article about gang-rape at University of (West?) Virginia and the disappearance of Hannah Graham. It disgusted and infuriated me at the same time so I decided to incorporate the theme into this story. And the worst part is that the encounter I read involved more guys and there was more blood and violence involved than what I just described. It's absolutely awful. For those of you wondering why my writing style has changed so much, look at my profile page under "EDIT." College has changed me in a lot of ways, so much that I don't know if I could ever write again the way I used to write. Feel free to PM me if you would like to catch up a bit! And reviews are always welcome, of course lol.