Caelum Ignis Ch54: "Death"
A Dramione fan fiction
Draco’s arm remained tense and clenched as he aimed it in the direction of the Dark Lord’s very dead body. Draco knew he was dead. He didn’t doubt that the spell had worked. Yet he also didn’t seem able to make himself lower the wand, or even to unclench his jaw. He gripped the wand as if his life depended on it, his knuckles white and pained.
Funnily enough, the wand wouldn’t even help him, not anymore.
It felt dead to him now.
Something in the spell had cracked its very core.
He might have been holding any inert piece of felled wood.
Despite that fact, which his mind didn’t dispute, Draco didn’t move, didn’t take his eyes off the red-eyed stare below him. He didn’t move at all, other than to breathe and pump blood via his heart, until a sound just below him made him jump.
He immediately knew something was wrong.
Something was wrong with her.
She was wheezing, gasping, like––
Merlin, she was suffocating.
She couldn’t breathe.
He dropped the cracked wand without looking at where it fell.
He turned and dropped to his knees in front of her, landing as close to where Hermione half-sprawled on the marble floor as he could. He ignored the pain that flared from his knees hitting the stone. He gripped her arms instinctively as he stared at her face.
“Honey,” he managed. “Breathe… breathe…”
She groaned, and fought to suck in air.
He could tell she wasn’t succeeding.
“Breathe… Hermione… my love… please, Salazar, breathe…”
His throat closed as he stared into her face.
Horrific bruises covered her throat, already swelling from the damage the Dark Lord had caused while he throttled her. He might have broken something, or just closed her windpipe so badly she couldn’t get enough air. Blood covered most of her face. It was matted in her hair. Her face was bruised. Her lip was broken, and she’d had a bloody nose, or maybe had thrown up blood, since it was also all over her mouth. He couldn’t tell yet if it was from a magical injury or something purely physical.
Her arms looked bruised where he held them carefully.
One of her hands appeared to be broken.
There was a vicious gash on her arm, likely from a knife, also unhealed.
That’s where they’d bled her for this fucking ritual.
He’d avoided looking at her until now.
He hadn’t thought he could bear it. He’d been terrified she was already dead or dying; he couldn’t let himself go there until he’d made her safe enough that he could get her out. He couldn’t let himself think about anything else, or do anything else, or be distracted by anything else, not until he’d removed every threat to her, not until he had her somewhere safe. He knew if he looked at her, he wouldn’t be able to focus on what he needed to do.
He would lose it, if he looked at her.
He’d crumple inside, like he was doing right fucking now.
“Hermione.” He murmured it, barely whispered her name. His fingers carefully threaded through some of her hair, pulling the matted carefully out of her face. Blood stuck to part of it in a clump, but he removed as much as he could. “Wife. Can you hear me?”
She was panting now, her face red.
She looked like she was getting air, at least.
He didn’t relax but stared at her glassy eyes, fighting not to panic.
“Hermione… honey, just hold on… I’ll get you out of here, I swear to Godric…”
She threw her head back violently.
She let out a piercing scream.
It happened so fast, so shockingly fast, he jumped.
His eyes widened. His heart leapt to his throat as he gasped in shock.
He didn’t let go of her.
His focus turned to her magical aura.
He adjusted his vision and then––
Oh Godric…
He cried out in horrified shock.
He still didn’t let go of her.
He couldn’t tear his eyes off what he could see.
A flood of… Salazar, something… flooded into her chest like black, stringy, rotten flesh. He could see it coming straight from the Dark Lord and into her, like something inside her was sucking the foul substance out of him as strongly as a whirlpool in a deep pond.
Draco could see the dark, twisting cords there, the magical connection that had somehow been strung between them.
They looked like pipes, like thick pipes full of sludge.
Whatever they were, whatever it was, it formed a dense passageway between them, forcing the transfer of… Merlin, what the unholy pits of the underworld was it?… straight from the Dark Lord’s chest and into hers.
Merlin, he’d interrupted a ritual.
Since he was a kid, he’d read about the dangers of stopping a ritual in progress.
It had unpredictable effects.
It had unpredictable, unforeseen, sometimes dangerous, sometimes deadly effects.
This particular ritual had obviously tied them to one another.
What had he done?
What the fuck had Voldemort done to his wife?
Draco gripped her tighter, but the flood of black substance continued to swim around him like he wasn’t there, flowing into her like an open water spigot on one of those massive muggle dams. He saw gold woven through the black clouds, gold and red, and––
“Oh, gods.” The words came out of him without him willing it.
He understood now, even if he didn’t want to.
It was a transference spell he’d interrupted.
Voldemort had been stealing her magic.
He’d been draining her of every fragment of her beautiful, wild, golden magic, thinking she was the caelum ignis.
Now, with him dead, that magic had nowhere to go, but the cords between them were still there. Instead of the magical cords being used to pull her magic into him by the strength of the Dark Lord’s own magic and will, that pipeline had reversed.
Not only was she getting her own magic rushing back into her… she was also getting all of his. She was getting all of it, not just his power and knowledge and ability, but every piece of his rotten, twisted, corrupted soul, and the magic coiled inherently into it.
“No!” He gasped, gripping her tighter. “NO!”
He reached out with his own magic.
He struggled to pull the cords off of her from the ritual. He yanked on them with some part of himself that wasn’t his hands, but those fucking connections were locked in tight, likely through blood and whatever else the Dark Lord had done to initiate the transference in the first place. Draco struggled in that magical space for an unknown number of very long-feeling minutes, but he could feel he was already too late.
He felt it when the flow of magic began to flow, and then beginning to dwindle.
He knew it wasn’t due to anything Draco himself had done.
No, it was slowing because the transference was almost complete.
He gasped, his throat closing painfully. He fought a sob that wanted to come out as something closer to a scream. His own gut and chest burned as he struggled to breathe, to control his magic before he lost himself for real. His neck hurt like hell from what he’d done to it while he removed the collar, but he barely felt it.
Then, before he could force out a single word…
…the transference ended.
It ended with a finality that he could tangibly feel.
Hermione slumped in his arms, and he had to grip her tightly to keep her from falling all the way and hitting her head on the floor.
The sob left him in that exact instant.
He hugged her against him, and cried into her hair.
“What in Salazar is wrong with her?” a harsh voice asked him.
The anger and caustic flavor of the question barely masked the fear Draco heard trembling beneath her words.
“What’s wrong with her?” Pansy asked a second time, louder. “Is she dead?”
Draco looked up and back, giving her a cold, silencing stare. He had no idea of the precise look in his eyes, but Pansy definitely got the message. She swallowed as her eyes flicked away, and he saw her jaw clench. She still gripped her wand in one hand. Mud still covered part of her face, and now a sheen of sweat made her skin shine in the light of the massive fireplace.
He didn’t ask her where she’d been just now.
Honestly, he’d thought she’d made a run for it.
Draco glanced around them, and around at the wider room. He’d picked up Hermione not long after the transference ended, and carried her outside the circle of bloody runes, maybe in the faint hope that it might make any kind of difference. It didn’t, not in any way, but he still kicked himself for not thinking of it earlier, and really, for not taking her out of there before he’d killed Riddle.
As soon as he took her out, he noticed the runes stopped flashing and sparking with that pale, blue-tinted glow. Soon after, they’d lost most of their illumination altogether, and dimmed down to the dark, angry red of hot embers in an old fire.
That lingering heat and light was now slowly fading too.
The ritual obviously considered itself completed.
Draco had put his wife back down on her feet, but he still gripped Hermione in his arms.
He was about to answer Parkinson, maybe just to tell her to keep her fucking eyes and opinions to herself, when the form he held went tense all at once.
He turned towards her right as she let out another sharp, loud gasp.
Her neck abruptly straightened.
Her head shot up.
Her eyes opened, and Draco stared, feeling his blood run cold when he saw them.
Black, vertical pupils shone there briefly.
She blinked, and those vertical pupils went back to round. Her eyes, which had briefly looked dark red, returned to their regular brown. Her pupils remained overly dilated, however, with too much black painting over their normal whisky amber with gold flecks.
He pulled her carefully up against him, holding her up with careful hands. He knew she didn’t need it from him; she could stand under her own power, but he didn’t want to let her go anyway. He continued to hold her, but more lightly now as he stared into her face, disturbed by the strangely vacant look that stared back at him.
“Honey…” he began cautiously. “We need to leave here. It’s time for us to…”
She walked away from him.
She pulled easily out of his arms and walked away from him as if he wasn’t there.
As if he hadn’t been holding her at all.
As if he hadn’t been speaking to her.
He considered going after her, trying to force her to come back, but something made him hesitate. He watched her, instead. His eyes followed her every move, her every facial tic and stare as she crossed the floor on muddy trainers. A hard pain formed deep in his chest as he watched her walk unhesitatingly up to the corpse of Voldemort.
She aimed her feet and eyes for his bloody hand––the same hand that still held the dark wand he’d gripped tightly when he fell.
She bent down and plucked the wand from his slackened fingers.
Then, her eyes and face still blank, she walked back to where Draco stood.
Without saying a word to him, she reached for his left wrist.
Her small fingers circled it. She gripped it tightly in shockingly strong fingers. He let out a gasp of shock and surprise, but didn’t fight her that time, either. He had no idea what she wanted, what she was after, until the wand she held hovered over his dark mark.
Her voice came out guttural, raw.
“Revertere servum,” she hissed.
She touched the wand to the center of the Mark.
Draco jumped. He felt a wash of cold go through his blood, so intense, he nearly pissed himself. Whatever he’d heard in that voice, it wasn’t fucking Hermione.
His arm felt like the ink caught on fire.
“Hermione,” he gasped.
He reached for her, but she shrugged off his hand, never taking her eyes off his Dark Mark. She continued to clutch his wrist, and he let out shocked groan when she jammed the wand deeper and more painfully into the center of the design.
The snake on his skin writhed around the skull, flicking its tongue.
She didn’t look alarmed.
She didn’t look apologetic.
She released him and stepped back, no expression on her face.
“Hermione,” he tried again. “Honey. Look at me. Please…”
She didn’t move.
“Hermione––”
“Shut up, Draco,” Pansy hissed.
He looked at her, his jaw hard, but her eyes were wide, stricken. She stared at Hermione in open fear. She felt Draco’s eyes and aimed that fear at him.
“It’s not her,” she whispered. “Can’t you see that it’s not her?”
Draco opened his mouth, then closed it.
Of course he could fucking see that.
He didn’t have any desire to say that out loud, though.
Hermione continued to stand there, oblivious to both of them.
She stood just outside the bloody circle, still close to him, but in a way that she didn’t care where he stood, or whether they stood together. She still gripped the wand in one small hand, but held it down by her side.
She stared at a blank spot in front of her, by the roaring fire.
She appeared to be waiting.
Draco looked around where they stood, indecisive, unsure what to do.
The sounds around them had petered out almost entirely.
Had she… Voldemort… called for reinforcements?
Why? There must still be Death Eaters inside the Manor.
All of the wizards and witches he’d seen running around the ballroom when he first arrived were gone, or effectively neutralized. They either lied on the floor… entrails spilling out of their abdomens, stupefied or paralyzed, with arms or legs missing where they’d been cut apart by other Death Eaters, dead from the killing curse, bled out, or unconscious and close to death… or else they had left the ballroom altogether.
He could hear some of them more distantly, in other parts of the Manor.
Some he even imagined he could hear outside, on the Manor grounds.
Either way, spells no longer zig-zagged through the smoky air.
He could hear a female Death Eater whimpering from the floor by the ballroom door.
He didn’t look over.
He already knew it wasn’t his Aunt Bellatrix… or his mother… the only two witches who might have drawn his eyes, absent an overt threat.
He hadn’t seen his mother.
He’d taken a second to look for her, hoping for her help to save Hermione. He cast a locating spell as he ascended the stairs, but she hadn’t shown up as being on the grounds.
Well, she hadn’t been on the grounds alive.
He had no idea where she was, or even if she’d been infected with madness like the others, but he hoped one of the elves might have gotten her out, or perhaps she’d found some place to hide, or even managed to portkey to another country. She now had a Dark Mark, so if she hadn’t been infected like the others, she should have been able to use her wand to apparate out through the Nott family wards.
Aunt Bella, on the other hand, was dead.
She attacked him not long after he entered the ballroom.
He’d taken her wand, the same walnut-wood wand he’d cracked when he wielded it against the Dark Lord. He’d disarmed her with a silent, wandless expelliarmus after slamming her temple hard against a stone mantle on that side of the room. He’d seen the crucio on her lips, and hadn’t felt particularly bad about either thing.
Yet when he’d raised her own wand against her, he’d inexplicably hesitated.
Somehow, he’d still struggled with the concept of killing her outright. Maybe it was that he’d clearly concussed her with the initial attack. Maybe it was seeing her dazed and scrabbling feebly around on the ballroom floor, eyes unfocused, head bleeding, panting.
In the end, he hadn’t had to make that choice.
Greyback, obviously out of his mind like the rest of them, had leapt on her and torn out her throat. Draco avada’d the werewolf while he fed on his aunt, but Bella was already gone.
There was zero question in his mind as to whether she was dead.
Seconds after that, he’d seen Hermione.
He’d seen her kneeling inside that flaming circle.
He’d seen Voldemort’s hands wrapped around her throat.
He’d seen the Dark Lord murdering her.
He stared at his wife now, and struggled to breathe. He struggled against tears, the pain in his throat, a helpless, hopeless feeling that filled his chest.
He could still feel her waiting.
He had a sick feeling he knew exactly what she was waiting for.
Or really… whom.
“Hermione,” he whispered, so soft, he wondered if she even heard him. “Hermione, honey… we need to go. We need to get out of here.”
Her lips twitched.
She didn’t look at him that time, either.
“Honey, I’ve missed you so much.” His throat closed so tightly he couldn’t speak past it for a few seconds. He fought to swallow, and realized he had his hands out towards her, even though he somehow didn’t dare touch her, not now.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please, Merlin… I need you. Come back to me.”
He swallowed thickly again.
“Whatever this is… it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to us…”
His last word got swallowed, unheard as a loud crack right by the massive fireplace shattered the quiet.
Draco felt his blood go cold.
His father stood there.
His father stood in front of the fireplace.
Draco didn’t feel surprise. He didn’t even feel fear, not at first.
He’d known what she wanted.
Even like this, he’d known exactly what his wife wanted, why she activated his Dark Mark with Voldemort’s wand.
Hermione… Voldemort… had called him back.
She’d let Lucius back into the wards.
Draco saw his father stare at the witch in front of him, shock opening the slate gray eyes in his disfigured face. He scanned over her face, then those same eyes dropped to the wand in her hand. Draco saw his father go back to staring at Hermione’s eyes, at Hermione’s pupils, which were back to that vertical slit, and looked red in the fire’s flames.
Draco didn’t make a sound. He stared at his wife’s face, and then at his father.
Then, silently, he took a step backwards.
He took another step.
Then another.
Lucius clearly saw that something was different, too. His eyes shifted next, and took in the dead body on the marble floor. He stared at the ring of runes, the blood, the empty decanter on the floor with the dragon design in iron that crawled around it, the blood remnants of potion and blood still around the lip of the bottle, and the dregs in the very bottom.
Lucius’s eyes darted back up to Hermione’s face.
A cruel smile twisted over his lips.
“My Lord?” he queried cautiously. “Is that you?”
Hermione stared at him with that chalk-white face, Voldemort’s wand gripped in her hand, her eyes shockingly red with that vertical pupil cutting them through the middle.
“My Lord?” Lucius tried again. “Was it you who summoned me?”
Hermione’s expression didn’t move.
Lucius took a careful step towards her.
His voice turned cajoling, obsequious, reverent.
“My Lord… what a triumph this is…” Lucius said in a purr. His voice gained some strength. “You have taken her… you have made yourself immortal… truly immortal… it is a feat beyond all imagining…”
Hermione didn’t move.
She still gripped the wand in one bloodless hand.
Draco stood maybe eight feet behind her now.
He continued to back off from the two of them slowly, more in instinct than with any real intention or even a coherent thought behind what he was doing. He would never abandon her. He would never leave her here, certainly not with Lucius. The instinct wasn’t to run, not from her, and not even from him. It was something else, something his mind didn’t bother to explain to him, or his magic make clear.
Even so, his heart hammered painfully in his chest.
The burned, skull-like visage of his father brought up a wave of revulsion and a child-like terror, dense enough and physical enough, it threatened to overwhelm him.
Strangely, his fear had no relationship to why he continued to back off the two of them. The backing off felt separate, even strategic. He couldn’t explain that, but his body followed the impulse anyway.
The closest he got to an explanation is that it felt like this part of things had nothing to do with him. Or really, maybe he simply had nothing to contribute to whatever happened next.
He couldn’t hurt his father.
He definitely couldn’t kill his father.
Godric, he couldn’t hurt her… even if she wasn’t Hermione anymore.
He had nothing to offer in this. He would never harm her, never. He’d offer himself up to be killed by her instead. He’d honestly rather if she just killed him than force him to do the same. Which made him wonder if all of this had been planned by the Dark Lord.
Had this been his intent all along?
Had Draco helped Voldemort fulfill his destiny in the end?
He fought to swallow as he took another step back.
That time, he stumbled on part of a body that lay just outside the wide circle of firelight. Draco glanced down in reflex, and found himself staring into the broad face of Gregory Goyle. Goyle’s throat had been cut so deeply, he’d nearly been decapitated. Draco’s childhood bully, hanger-on, and bodyguard stared up at the ceiling, but with only one eye.
The other eye had been torn out of its socket, leaving a bloody hole. It didn’t look like it had been done with magic.
Disgust rose in Draco’s throat.
It hit him that his bare feet were coated in Goyle’s blood.
He gasped a little as he stepped over him.
The sound and his movements brought Lucius’s eyes and attention towards him.
“Ah.” The Lord of Malfoy Manor smirked as he took in Draco’s face. “My darling son. You have no idea how pleased I am to see you.” His gray eyes darted around the room as the remaining half of his lips quirked upward. “Where is your lovely mother? I would like to have some words with her, as well…”
Draco looked at Hermione, who still hadn’t moved.
He swallowed, right before his gaze darted to his father’s left hand, which gripped a familiar wand with a silver handle. The emerald eyes of the snake head glinted in the firelight.
His mind felt paralyzed. He didn’t know what to do.
His father started to raise his wand––
Hermione’s arm rose evenly with his.
Lucius’s eyes darted towards her.
Draco saw the flash of nerves that skated across the slate-gray rings.
Lucius lowered his wand hand at once. He bowed to her, his expression submissive.
“I am sorry, My Lord. I merely wished to discipline my son. Or at least stop him from running away like the sniveling coward he is…” His eyes flashed coldly towards Draco. “…I will, of course, conduct my business with him later, if you would prefer it, My Lord. And I will only do as much or as little as you wish, given he is now your loyal servant first.”
Draco looked at Hermione.
He could no longer see her entire face from where he stood. He’d walked away from her in a diagonal line, and could see only a fire-lit slice of her profile. He could glimpse the blood smeared over her neck and mouth, and the bruises, and one of her eyes that wasn’t really hers.
He saw that eye flicker as he watched.
He saw it change.
He couldn’t see her well enough to know for sure in what way.
He swore her face softened in those split seconds, though.
He saw color return to her cheeks, then leech out again.
He saw her jaw harden in a clench, then her face go back to being blank.
He watched her minutely, and he could swear he saw––
“Secarecorpu Medius,” she hissed in a low voice.
He jumped, and felt his heart leap to his throat.
Merlin. That sounded like… Godric, it sounded so much like her.
That hadn’t been the Dark Lord, not entirely.
Tears sprang to his eyes, even as a lashing, coiling whip of dark purple light left the end of Voldemort’s wand. The face looked almost like hers, but she gripped the wand in that unnervingly white hand, overly bony and overly leeched of blood.
The hand looked alien, too cold to be hers, too dead.
The coiling, whiplike spell licked over Lucius in a swift, silent line, but Draco couldn’t tell at first if it had done anything to him at all. His father sucked in a startled breath, but Draco looked at Hermione, light-headed with shock and confusion as he stared at her. He dared not hope, but his heart hammered so hard in his chest, he felt like he might be having a heart attack.
Merlin, it had sounded so much like her, though.
More than that, it sounded like she’d been fighting the presence in her. From the effort and intention he’d heard, it was like she’d forced the words out through her lips and tongue with everything left in her.
She’d nearly spat the spell at Lucius, maybe just so she could get past––
He glanced at his father then, and froze in shock.
He hadn’t realized until that second, he’d reversed the direction of his feet and started walking back towards his wife.
Now he halted in place.
He could only stare at Lucius once he realized what was happening to him.
The spell hadn’t done nothing to him after all.
It hadn’t simply paralyzed Lucius, either.
Lucius started to fall, but not normally, and not in only one direction.
Draco could only stare, unblinking, as two different sides of his father’s body, bisected from the top of his skull down to the place where his legs met, slid apart from one another and felt with two sickening, wet thuds, one to either side of the fireplace’s hearth.
Draco let out a shocked cry, more revulsion and disbelief than any real emotion, and stood there, panting, as he stared at the neatly cut side-views of his father’s body, where Hermione’s spell had sliced through bone, flesh, veins, cartilage, organs, and muscle as if they were all made of custard pudding.
He could see his father’s heart beat in his chest as blood silently pooled over the hearth.
Once, twice, three times… four… a heavy pause… five… a longer pause… six…
It didn’t beat a seventh time.
Long white hair spread out in the lake of blood that slowly ceased to get bigger.
Draco stared at him.
He saw the precise instant the light left his father’s eyes.
He walked forward without being able to stop himself, still barefoot, revolted by the blood and gore on the floor, but determined to see it for himself. He never got anywhere near his father’s blood, even though he walked right up to the fire-lit hearth.
He stopped when he was maybe ten feet in front of Hermione.
He stared down at his father, without really knowing what he wanted, or why he needed to be so close. Maybe he did know, though. Maybe it was just to reassure himself… to really, truly know that bastard was finally dead.
He was dead, Draco told himself. He was really fucking dead.
Somehow, it took more than a minute of standing there for him to really believe it.
He blinked then, and somehow, he was back in the room.
The ballroom reeked of blood and smoke and what might have been firewhiskey.
He turned around slowly, and stared at the face of his wife.
She stared back at him, still holding up the wand of the Dark Lord.
He saw her staring into nothing at first, those vertical pupils dilating and contracting in the firelight, her jaw working.
Then, suddenly, something inside her seemed to click back into focus.
The vertical, dark line stared at him, and as it did, it melted down into a round, black dot. The dot grew smaller until it was once more surrounded by light, sunlit brown. Gold flecks embedded in amber picked up flickers of firelight as she looked at him. Her face contorted as she stared, and she abruptly let her hand drop, the same one gripping the wand.
She held it at her side after that, pointed down.
She never took her eyes off his face.
“Draco,” she gasped.
His heart hurt so badly, he could have screamed.
He didn’t think, though.
He ran to her.
He crushed her in his arms.
He brought down the ancient family wards of House Nott.
He didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it.
He was shocked at how easy it was.
He didn’t want to think about how much easier it might have been because his magic was so tightly bound to Hermione’s. With Hermione holding both her own magic and now possibly… definitely… at least some part of the magic of the Dark Lord… taking down wards he definitely shouldn’t have accessed or understood so easily took him less than twenty minutes.
He didn’t want to think about that yet.
All he could think about was getting her out of there.
He needed to get her the fuck out of there.
Then he would think about the rest of it.
Where to take her still buzzed around the back of his mind, and forced him to face the reality of their situation at least a little. He might need to take her somewhere away from the Order at first. He definitely might need to keep her away from her parents. Both things pointed to relocating her somewhere other than Dumbledore’s beach house on the North Sea, which is apparently where she’d been living with Nott and Snape, and where he’d just told Dobby to bring her parents. So yes, Draco might need to take her somewhere else, somewhere alone, just the two of them, until he figured out how to fix this.
He needed to get her help, however.
He had no ego invested in trying to do this alone.
He didn’t care where the help came from, as long as it was real help: the Order, Snape, assuming he was still alive, maybe even Nott. He would send for McGonagall, Kingsley, Lupin, the D.M.L.E.… anyone from the Department of Mysteries who might be of use, a curse-breaker maybe, or someone who specialized in magical possessions.
All he knew was he needed help.
He needed someone to tell him how to fix her.
She’d let him hug her, and stroke her face, and even grip her hand, but he could feel what was wrong with her. He could feel it and see it all over her magic. It was like a deadly parasite that wound through and around her magical aura, choking that beautiful, wild, golden light he’d seen in her since he was twelve years old. He could see flashes of that gold, flashes of her in her face and eyes, but the dense, dark, coldness of that alien magic scared the shit out of him.
He worried it would drown the light-filled parts of her.
He worried it would suck her dry.
He worried it would crush all of the light in her, and eventually kill her… or worse, steal her body totally and make it over in his image.
Godric… he needed help.
“What is wrong with her?” Pansy muttered. She watched Hermione’s face nervously, her expression worried. “Merlin, she looks like a corpse, Dray. She looks like she’s already…”
She hesitated at whatever she’d been about to say, maybe because she saw or felt Draco’s reaction. When he gripped Hermione’s hand tighter, stepping in front of her instinctively, some harder expression in Pansy’s face faltered.
The caustic, harsher note in her voice softened, too.
“Draco, what happened?” she asked, careful.
He shook his head, unable to answer.
They were no longer in the ballroom. His bare feet stood on carpet now, although it was still visibly stained with blood here and there, and he had to be careful to avoid broken glass, and pools of alcohol and piss and whatever else that dotted the floor.
He’d finished bringing down the Nott Manor wards.
It hadn’t been a gentle process, despite how easily he’d done it. His magic had blown out a good chunk of the roof, at least in this part of the main building. When he looked up, he saw gold and orange and blue through the opening in the high ceiling, and realized it was dawn.
How had they possibly been here so long?
It felt like it had been scarcely an hour since he woke up in that cell with the collar gone.
“Where are we going?” Pansy asked next.
She asked it in nearly a whisper that time.
She sounded afraid, desolate.
Draco looked around where they stood, in a large sitting room with a fireplace not far from the massive ballroom, but far enough that he relaxed slightly, just from being away from so much death. Pansy looked around the somewhat warmer room with him, her wand gripped in her hand, her eyes nervous. In the rising sunlight, she looked shockingly pale, and the mud and blood on her face stood out in starker contrast.
It was nothing to how pale and bloody and beat up Hermione looked.
The house was eerily quiet now.
All of the Death Eaters had gone.
Draco had no idea how many had escaped.
He hadn’t tried to count all the bodies they’d left behind. He’d only heard one or two loud cracks from apparition when the last of the wards came down.
He pulled on his magic, just to make sure he had enough of it left, in the event some of the Death Eaters stayed behind. He looked at Pansy then, his throat so sore and dry he could barely swallow, and nodded towards her.
“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked, his voice a hard rasp.
She hesitated, then nodded, once. “Do you want me to do it?” She sounded even more uncertain than she looked. “Draco, I don’t know if I can. I’m exhausted, and I’m still not very good at side-along apparition even when I’m not. I could maybe do one with just you, or just her, but there’s no way I could bring both of you, especially not––”
He cut her off.
“Can you do yourself?” he asked. He paused, then lied, “I’ve never been there before. I could maybe use legilimency to see where this place is, but if it has a fidelius charm on it, I won’t even be able to see it. I could meet you somewhere, or––”
“Wait!” Her eyes widened. “The galleon!”
He’d forgotten all about the protean-charmed galleon.
Now he clenched his jaw, and tried to decide if he should argue against her using it.
He couldn’t really, not without giving away the game.
Maybe he would just go back with her, just for a short time. Long enough to see about Snape and Nott, and tell them what happened, assuming they were even alive. Dobby could send for help if they weren’t, or send help to them somewhere else, perhaps. He just needed to not let her parents see her like this––
“I found it!” Pansy gloated.
Apparently she’d been looking for the galleon the whole time he’d been hesitating. She yanked the coin out of the depth of one of her inner pockets, and he watched her aim her wand at one flat surface. Her hand was shaking.
She’s right, he couldn’t help thinking. She’s in no shape to apparate herself anywhere, much less try to bring one of us along.
Her brow furrowed as she concentrated on whatever message she was sending through the coin. She seemed satisfied then, and sharply lowered her wand. She held the coin up to the sunlight, and stared at it, maybe waiting for some kind of answer. When nothing came after thirty or so seconds, she frowned.
“I don’t know how long we should wait––” she began in a huff.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Three beings apparated around them.
Draco stepped in front of Hermione, again instinctively, and raised a hand in the direction of the three forms that grew outlines out of wisps of faint magical light.
One of them was Kingsley.
Another was Lupin.
The third was––
“Where is she?” a hard, angry, familiar voice demanded. “Where the fuck is she, Malfoy? What in God’s sake happened here?”
Potter strode forward across the ornate Persian rug that decorated the center of the Nott family sitting room. He looked oddly, startlingly out of place, despite the blood and splinters of wood and plaster that covered most of the room from the half-exploded ceiling.
He held up his wand, aiming it right at Draco.
“Harry!” Lupin called out sharply. “Calm down!”
Kingsley raised his own wand, but didn’t aim it at Potter. He gazed around the room instead, and stared up at the broken ceiling.
Potter acted like Lupin hadn’t spoken. He didn’t look at Kingsley at all.
He looked manic, murderously angry, and like he was about to throw a crucio at Draco just for the fuck of it, and not necessarily because he thought it might force an answer out of him. Draco opened his mouth. He struggled to speak, too much in shock and too exhausted to even know how to deal with an irate Potter waving a wand in his face.
He tried anyway. He started to, at least.
––then Hermione wrenched her hand violently free from his.
Draco turned to look at her, but she was already stepping around him. He was left staring after her, trying to decide if he should try to stop her with Potter so obviously unhinged.
He thought at first she would run to her closest friend, embrace him or scold him, or maybe launch into an explanation of everything that had happened, laughing and crying and trying to make sense of everything they’d been through over the last however-many hours.
Then Draco saw her face.
He saw her eyes.
The vertical pupils were back.
Her face had gone deathly white, and looked harder, thinner, like it was nothing but skin stretched over blood-splattered bone.
“Potter!” he shouted. He lunged at her, trying to stop her, but too late. He tried to get between them a second time, but she was already too far front of him. “Harry!” he snapped. “Get out of here! Now! Run!”
He already knew, somehow, he was too fucking late.
How had he forgotten that the Dark Lord and Potter were mortal enemies?
“HARRY!” Draco’s voice came out harsh, louder than before. “Apparate! Apparate the fuck out of here! It’s not her! You have to get out of here, before––”
He grabbed for her arm.
Unfortunately, it was the wrong arm.
She’d already raised the other one. Her too-small, bony hand gripped the Dark Lord’s wand, and her entire face contorted under the presence of that black cloud that had darkened all of her magic, twisting it into something foul and corrupt but insanely powerful.
When she spoke that time, he heard nothing in it that sounded like his wife.
“Avada Kedavra!”
The voice snarled through her bruised and swollen throat and blood-stained lips.
Green light slashed through the air like cold lightning.
It moved too fast for Harry to evade it; the magical charge slammed towards Potter without anything in its way.
It looked like it had been aimed directly at his chest.
At the last instant, however, the current veered, and focused right at the jagged scar on Potter’s forehead. It looked as if the scar drew it and swallowed it, like an iron lightning rod that yanked the magical charge that way and concentrated the intensity of it there.
The full force of the spell exploded onto Potter’s head.
Then… oh Godric, then…
It rebounded back.
Draco could only stand there as the spell knocked Potter off his feet and ricocheted back at Hermione with even more force. It hit into Harry so violently, it was as if someone smashed his legs and knees out from under him with a giant sledgehammer. The green magical charge flashed as it hit, and then it exploded backwards at Hermione.
It tunneled into her chest so hard, it emitted sparks.
They both hit the floor within an instant of one another.
They both fell without making a single sound.
Once down, neither of them moved.