1.
It was bad.
Or rather, the beginning had been good enough to be bad. The middle had been just an atrocity after another. And the end? The end was terrible.
(The end was just mindless slaughter, blood spilled on every dais available, gore knocking on random doors, pain coloring the sky in an abstract reinterpretation of whatever. The end was just insanity dripping, nonsense wrapped in battle, war fought for the love of fighting.)
The end was nothingness; thoughtless and hopeless inexistence.
Nobody used to know more about hope than Gabrielle Delacour.
(She used to be the toddler with the daisy crowns and the teenager with yellow painted walls and the friend with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of chocolate chip cookies and stupid knock-knock jocks and boys-are-dumb-so-go-for-girls speeches. She was none of those things anymore.
She had reasons not to and her reasons were mostly marble headstones and loneliness of blood.
They were good enough as far as reasons went.)
Of course, you couldn't in all fairness say she's lost more than anyone else, but it would've been a lie to say she hadn't lost enough. She's lost herself, so what do you want more?
(Knock knock. Who's there? Not your sister, she's not playing with a full deck anymore.)
By the end, Gabrielle didn't have hope not to die anymore but wanted to stay alive out of a twisted sense of spiteful rightfulness that tingled in her veins.
(She wanted to lock herself in a room and decay there, with an always opened window so she could breath the changes in the air, and drapes that reached the floor so she couldn't see the sun, and she wanted quiet interrupted by the buzz of other people's lives, and she wanted to be no part of those existences, but the kind of illusory being who's so dead on her feet her name gets stuck in your throat when you think it.
She just didn't want to be truly, undeniably dead.
She didn't.)
By the time they had all those losses and all those deaths and all those heavily failed plans, she was just tired and the only thing she had left was her mind. Even that was questionable.
(And a dead mother and a dead father and an insane sister and so many dead Weasleys she needed more fingers to count them than she had.
She cut some off Death Eaters and counted afterwards.)
But she still had it, her ration, so she knew right away sending Ginevra Weasley back was a very bad idea.
(Almost as bad as the end, honestly.)
"She's too raw," she told Hermione one night. "She'll mess it up."
(Hermione, too, was tired by now. Tired and legless and heart-broken.
Harry was dead.
Ron was dead.
Draco Malfoy… Draco Malfoy was a special story altogether and Gabrielle knew better than to bring him up again.)
"Dumbledore wants her because of their bond." She pursed her lips in thought. "But I think you might be right. Ginny doesn't know how to manage her anger anymore. She'll want to do it all up-front and he'll kill her before she finishes her little tirade."
(War had hardened Hermione Malfoy. It had also opened her eyes.)
"Do you really believe this is the best shot we've got?" Gabrielle asked. "We're talking negating our entire reality here for the slight chance another future might be better."
"To be fair, we're actually talking about leaving our fates in the hands of an unstable woman with deep emotional traumas because a puppeteer whose best ideas were to fake his death and sent kids on wild goose chases thinks it's best. There's no decent shot in that; it's doomed to fail." She shrugged. "But really, what's there to live for anymore?"
(War had embittered Hermione Malfoy. It had also made her sharper.
And Gabrielle agreed.)
It didn't go well, of course, but it also went worse than they expected.
They all died, fell like heroes fighting the good fight, like all the dead whose deaths are glossed over in things that start as fairytales. Gabrielle didn't. She jumped over the body of what had been the brightest witch of the age to get to the experimentally enchanted Time Turner.
She didn't and saw Dumbledore trying to Apparate away before being hit by a stray curse.
She didn't and stepped on Ginny Weasley's mangled corpse and all that dirty red hair coiled around her legs.
A deviated hex hit the jewelry and propelled her into the past engulfed in a thick cloud of colorful dust. By the time her body fell on the grassy hill, her time ceased to exist.
Just like magic.
Hello? This is such a rare (inexistent?) pairing that I doubt anyone would read it but hello :)