Chapter 1 of 5. Okay, this is an angst story and unfortunately it includes poor Hermione being hurt, which I hate. I don't know why I write this stuff if I end up hating the story!! Oh well, I have done the other chapters and they will be updated every time I reached 5 reviews on a story. This means I will not update without 5 reviews!!

Disclaimer: Unfortunately I do not owe Mr Potter and his beloved characters. After all, if I did, Ron would be dead, Draco would be with Harry and Hermione would be with Snape!! I don't own the lyrics to Papa Roach's Last Resort either.

0-0-0-0

Cut my life into pieces
This is my last resort,
Suffocation, no breathing Don't give a fuck if I cut my arms bleeding

Hermione stared at herself in the mirror. It was a stranger's face that she saw staring back at her, the face with the awful nest of hair, buck teeth and hideous eye colour. Her finger traced the faint scar that seemed to dominate her features, a scar that began under her right eye and followed the curves in her skin down her face, straight down the right hand side of her neck before running straight down her chest, past the fabric of her white school shirt, disappearing in between her breasts.

She grabbed her wand, which she had put on the edge of the sink and raised her arm, drawing her wand across, wordlessly casting a spell, causing the wand to cut a line in her forearm. She hissed in pain as the blood began to flow down her arm, and as she dropped her arm it covered her hand.

She reached into her robes, which were lying discarded on the floor and drew out a silver dagger, similar to the ones used in Potions, and carved a word in her arm, watching in grim satisfaction as it marked her skin, labelling her for what she really was. Until her birthday in October, when she would turn 18 at last, she kept to these little 'sessions', rebelling against who she was.

She glanced at the girl in the mirror, scorned her and placed her bloody hand on the reflection, covering the mirror in her own blood. The wound had yet to clot, as with the word, but she didn't care. She wrapped her arm up in bandages and put her robes on, covering up that scar, the one that showed just what she had been through.

It didn't matter to everyone else that Hermione had got hurt. Harry and Ron were basking in the limelight after defeating Voldemort, but it didn't matter that she had allowed herself to be captured to give Harry that much needed distraction as Voldemort had been too focussed on her. Unfortunately Harry had taken a lot longer than he had intended, leaving Hermione under the capture for almost three days. After only an hour Hermione was screaming and it took a lot to make her scream.

She had been tossed around from Death Eater to Death Eater, all eager to make their mark on the 'filthy mud blood' who was Harry's friend. They did whatever they wanted with her.

Riddling her body with scars? That she could deal with.

Being raped repeatedly? Even that she could deal with.

But being shown visions, visions designed just to torture her. Visions of her murdering everyone she loved, walking out of Voldemort's camp and finding everyone she loved dead. That had cracked her.

She had nightmares for months; in fact she still had nightmares now. Harry and Ron had suffered none of this, only the reward as Avada Kedavra was cast. The scar she had, the lovely visible one, was given to her by Voldemort, as he gently traced the dagger down her body when holding her as a hostage against the boys.

Ron had often put advances on her before the battle, but since Voldemort had been defeated he had left her alone. She had overheard him once, talking to Seamus about how ugly she was, and how he wondered what he had seen in her in the first place. Now he was famous, he had girls throwing themselves at him left and right, and Hermione was no longer good enough for him.

Even Harry seemed to have abandoned her. For about a month after the victory he had tried to include her in activities, in a faint hope that he would be able to see her smile again, hear her laugh. But she would just sit there, a blank expression on her face, her eyes filled with the pain that she relived everyday.

There was no one left, no one that cared about her enough to keep on looking after her, to keep on trying to include her. Ginny had ignored her since that day, ever since Hermione had been captured. It was as if Hermione had ceased to exist for Ginny, and then for everyone else.

Her teachers left her to herself, and secretly missed the know-it-all who waved her hand in the air for the slightest thing. However, no one quite understood what she had been through except for the sallow, spiteful man that lived in the dungeons. Snape had prevented her from being hurt too violently, slyly casting healing spells at her to heal some of the more dangerous cuts and abrasions. She had even been burnt, put over a fire as logs were added. She had watched the flames grow higher and higher, beginning to lick at her bare body, and she had screamed for their satisfaction, learning early that her screams were what pleased them most. Lucius Malfoy had cut her skin-deep with his wand, the sight of her blood and the sound of her hoarse screams turning him on.

She knew that it was Lucius Malfoy who hurt her the most. He had been the one who had taken her first, delighting in ripping her from the inside out. He had slammed into her with so much force that something within had actually cracked, and she sobbed in pain from it. She had lost her virginity to the man who took satisfaction from watching his victims writhe in pain under him.

"A wretch is no fun if she's not fighting." His words echoed round her head. Many times those words had come back to haunt her, and they wouldn't go away, tormenting her until she fell to the floor, clutching at her robes, her eyes weeping, her breath shuddering, her body shaking. She had survived, but she wished she had followed in the footsteps of the rest of his victims and had passed, their wishes of release from the pain granted in the bittersweet form of death.

As she relived the tortures, her eyes became clouded, and then empty as she placed the mask back on.

She cleaned the mirror, and glanced one last time at the person in the mirror. Her eyes cast downwards as she turned away and left the bathroom, making her way back to the Gryffindor Tower.

Normally she would have been allowed out at this late hour, being a prefect, but once McGonagall had realised the lasting effects of the war on Hermione, she had been stripped of her position in front of everyone in the Great Hall, humiliated once again. It hadn't made much difference to Hermione afterwards, because she often found herself the brunt of everyone else's anger. It was almost as if she was the dummy in the corner that everyone knew was there but only paid attention to it when they were upset or angry.

Draco Malfoy had gone to town on her. He hadn't been linked to the Death Eaters' attack, and it was proven that he hadn't been inducted into the circle, but the acts he performed on her to prove that she was just mud on the bottom of his shoe had been extreme. His favourite trick was to dye her hair a different colour every week, but he also ruined her schoolwork by covering it in permanent ink, and he also cast curses on her to make her appearance even more awful.

"Oi, Granger," Draco saw her walking along the corridor. "What you doing out at this time? That's 20 points from Gryffindor."

Hermione just walked past him, ignoring him completely.

"Granger, listen to me," Draco grabbed her arm. "You should listen to me."

His arm brushed against her newly carved wound and she couldn't prevent the intake of air as it stung. He moved his grip from her forearm to her hand and hauled up the sleeve of her robe, up to the elbow. Draco took off her poorly wrapped bandage to reveal the word 'SLUT' cut into her arm.

"Granger, who did this to you?" Draco gasped, looking at her.

There was no answer as Hermione tried to stop the onslaught of tears from erupting, not wanting to show weakness in front of the boy who had made her life a living hell for the last seven years. Draco wrapped his arm around her and led her down the stairs.

"Where are you taking me?" Hermione asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. "Please tell me." Her voice became high as she pleaded. "Tell me where you're taking me. I won't go! I won't suffer again. Please let me go. I'll do anything you want me to, just please, I'm begging you to let me go."

She saw Draco's lips moving, but the voice coming out of it didn't belong to him. It was Lucius again, saying those words: "A wretch is no fun if she's not fighting."

She screamed and tried to pull away, the comforting warm walls of the castle fading away, turning into the dank, musty stone walls of her torture chamber. The chains were connected to the wall, and they clanked knowingly at her. The hand holding hers lost its warmth, and it became slightly slippy. Hermione looked at the hand and the slippiness was caused by her blood, which dripped from their conjoined hands onto the floor, where she fell to, the blackness overtaking her as the pain of the memory intensified.

"Miss Granger!" A familiar, comforting voice called to her through her darkness. "Miss Granger, I'm going to take you to my quarters. Draco, if you would hasten to get Madam Pompfrey and inform her that Hermione Granger has taken a turn for the worst and to floo to my quarters immediately. Now hurry, boy!"

Hermione was only slightly aware of the sensation of being picked up and someone with warm, strong arms carrying her. The person was silent, yet she knew the person was a friend, and would do her no harm.

She heard the voice once more, before she was placed on a soft surface, and covers were drawn around her. A damp cloth was applied to her forehead and the strands of hair that clung to her face were gently put back in their proper place.

"Miss Granger?" The voice said softly. "I know that you are awake, but you're in shock. I need you to open your eyes for me, so you can see that I am a friend, and I mean you no harm."

Hermione fought the internal war. She tried to pull herself out of the blackness that encased her inside, the blackness that tried to keep her safe, to keep her from remembering. Her eyelids began to flicker, and dim light streamed in as she opened them further.

"Professor Snape," she whispered, her eyes focussing on the dark-haired, pale-skinned face that looked down on her with an expression of concern adorning its features.

"Hello, Miss Granger," He replied softly. "You experienced a momentary memory lapse. You thought you were back with Voldemort when, in fact, you were safe with Draco. I expect it's because Draco looks a lot like his father."

Hermione flinched and moved slightly away from Snape. He put a hand on her shoulder firmly, to keep her in place. He leaned forward, pinning her slightly under his body. Hermione, instead of feeling repulsion, and a sense of terror, found the weight comforting, and in response leaned further toward Snape.

He felt the change in her position and realised that she found him comforting. He adjusted his angle so that he was lying next to her, with her cuddled up to his side. When Madam Pomfrey finally walked in, this was how she found them. The shocked expression only flickered across her face, until it was replaced with her normal no-nonsense look.

"Severus, I need you to move," She said briskly. "I need to be able to reach her to treat her."

"She finds me comforting," Snape said, looking down at Hermione.

"It's because you were there to help her when she was suffering most, Severus," She continued. "You healed her when she was hurt; you whispered kind words when she was lying broken on the inside. You saved her life."

"For it to come to this?" Snape asked. "For it to come to having a girl who was the perfect pupil, but is now the girl that goes to the bathroom every evening to scar herself even more, to brand herself with names? She believes that she deserves what she got, especially as everyone ignored her afterwards. She was a heroine, more than Potter or Weasley, yet she was pushed aside. Where's the justice in that?"

"That's life, Severus," Madam Pomfrey sighed. "That's just life."

Severus finally moved out of the way and Madam Pomfrey bustled round. She checked Hermione's vital signs and her temperature, and ruled that she was perfectly fine, apart from the lapse in her memory and the severe scarring on her arms.

"I would normally suggest moving her, as it's what normally happens," Madam Pomfrey began. "But considering that it's not a good idea for her to be left by herself, I suggest that she stays down here with you. You should take a couple of weeks off work and stay with her. She needs you."

"But I don't need her," Snape argued. "Why should I waste my time on a teenage girl?"

"Because somewhere inside of you there is a heart," She replied. "And you need to learn to show some compassion. There is a girl who needs you, and you have the power to save her from her memories and from herself. Please, Severus, please do this."

Snape nodded curtly, and Madam Pomfrey left. Snape glanced at Hermione, and then went into his living room, planning on sleeping on the sofa.

"I'm the one sleeping on the sofa?" Snape muttered to himself. "Typical."

At that moment Hermione screamed. It was a scream that tore right through Snape, paralysing him for a second. The sobbing that came after it was the worst. It made his head throb, and his heart speed up, and he hurried into the bedroom to find out what was wrong.

Hermione was sat up in bed, her back to the headboard, her wand out. Her wand hand was shaking so severely that the wand almost fell out of her hand. The wand moved violently about, Hermione flinging it everywhere, checking everywhere for an unknown enemy.

"Hermione?" Snape said cautiously. The wand aimed at him. "Hermione, it's me, Professor Snape. Can you lower your wand please?"

Hermione stared at him for a moment, her beautiful brown eyes troubled. The wand was lowered, and Snape heaved a sigh of relief before advancing towards her, sitting on the edge of the bed facing her.

"Hermione, what happened? What did you dream?" He asked, his voice kind.

"I don't want to talk about it," She said sharply.

"You need to talk," Snape persisted. "You can't just do that. You can't just bottle it all up. You're killing yourself because of it."

"Good!" She shouted. "I want to be dead. I would be if you would just leave me alone. I can't wait until I can free of all this. Free of all the pain, all the memories."

"Hermione Granger, talk to me," Snape ordered, trying a different tact.

"I was back there," Hermione said suddenly, her voice dropping to a whisper. "It was the first time. The time when Lucius took me. When he marked me and said those words. 'A wretch is no fun if she's not fighting.' He said them to me. And then he forced..."

Her voice faltered and Snape sat in silence, waiting for her to continue. They were sat like that for almost five minutes, neither talking, both wanting to at the same time.

"He forced himself into me," Hermione said at last. "He wouldn't stop. His knife was cutting my skin every time he moved, and blood just kept pouring out, but he didn't care. I was bleeding to death, but he was getting his enjoyment. Then when he finished he left me, bleeding and naked on the floor. I couldn't move, I couldn't scream. I was just laying there."

"Thank you for telling me," Snape said. "You should tell me whenever you remember something like this. That way you might just stop cutting yourself."

"I doubt it!" Hermione scoffed. "It's like you being nice for a day. Never going to happen."

"I'm being nice now, aren't I?" Snape asked.

"Yeah, but..." Hermione stopped. "Fine, not entirely impossible then."

She turned her back on him and laid down, her hair spread across the pillow. Snape looked over her until her breathing levelled and became deep, telling him that she had fallen asleep. He crept out of the room, and laid down on the sofa, still wearing his robes. He pulled a blanket over himself and tried to get some sleep.

However, every time he began drifting off, a scream would seep into his consciousness and he would leap out of bed and to Hermione's side. Finally, after four times of this, he took his blanket into the bedroom with him and instead made his bed on the floor.

0-0-0-0