Senses

Chapter 1

There was no light, no sound, no voice. The world had completely fallen away. A deep, frigid void leaving nothing behind but pain and the stench of blood.

Hermione had lost all sense of time as she lay motionless. Her greyed curse scarred eyes staring half-lidded into the world above. Waiting, waiting for the hands that came to defile her. She had long lost the ability to fight. Her body weakened by countless days without food or water. Her only sustenance, a thick salty liquid given to her as a 'reward' after the hands had retreated.

She had learned quickly, conserving her strength to survive just one more torturous night. Her throat long since broken by a fist during one of the first nights when she'd believed herself stronger than her captors, preventing her pleas for mercy—for death, from passing her lips.

A fever had taken her hearing. Left inside a cage exposed to the elements of the forest to which she had been taken. Or so she could assume by the smell and sound that had accompanied her beginning days. Infection had quickly set in on the long gashes around her sides and over her stomach and legs, left to fester.

She'd almost believed it to be a relief as she didn't have to hear the mournful desperate pleas of the others that had surely been taken. None of them had spoken to her, their voices young and high as they begged to go home—begged for the hands to stop.

Her sight had been what felled her. Attacked just as she was leaving behind her family. Stolen away, in broad daylight. She had hoped she had run far enough away before she had taken her fall, sparing the lives of her parents but that hope had been quickly extinguished.

The hands came like clockwork, or so she could assume. Her body constantly floating in and out of the silent reality that had become her waking world. Slowly opening her legs, running up her bruised knees to what they sought between. Forcing her release, time and again. Her body no longer had the strength to express her shame, her mind having merely shut off in a last attempt to shield her sanity.

Her clothes were nothing but shredded wisps of thread, caked in her life essence. The long unhealed wounds of countless slicing hexes having seen to their departure. Her jeans had been taken after her first escape attempt. Three days after she'd been taken. She'd made it fairly far given that she'd been unable to see. Though ultimately she'd wound up getting turned around and was caught just outside the wards that she'd set off.

It had only been after the fever had taken her hearing that she'd been given a meager blanket to shield her from the elements. The fabric was barely enough to keep her decently covered let alone provide any actual protection. The best it was good for was keeping the feeling of bugs crawling over her from reaching her skin. It helped in the evening as well when the sun would burn her face. The top of her present prison didn't have bars at the top. Another privilege she'd lost.

It had been a month into her capture, when she still had mind enough to track the sun through the sky. She'd been left tied to a tree by her ankle, under the belief that she'd exhausted all her will to escape. She hadn't though, she'd been merely conserving her strength. Waiting for the right moment. Listening, waiting, counting. She'd memorized all their names and their schedules. When they would leave and who they'd leave behind.

She'd taken to holding a girl smaller than her in her arms, both for the warmth and the simple comfort of another human being. The girl's name had been Alicia, a muggle-born witch in her second year, Hufflepuff house. She, like Hermione, had been stolen away in the brazen daylight while her parents had been at work.