A/N: This was originally a pitiful attempt at NaNoWriMo, but it has since transformed into an idea that's been knocking around in my head for quite a while now. I hope to update it regularly, but I am a terrible procrastinator so please forgive me if I don't always post chapters on time. This fic is dedicated to my best friend for always bursting with excitement to read the completely unremarkable things I've written.
Disclaimer: As always, anything recognizable belongs to the wonderful J.K. Rowling and all quotes used belong to their individual authors. "A Redemption of Some Kind" is temporarily borrowed from a line in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. Nothing but the plot is mine.
The first time Hermione Granger learns about war, it's with the Cruciatus curse tearing through her body like a thousand white-hot knives and the word 'Mudblood' carved into her forearm. A pair of grey eyes watches her carefully as she violently thrashes on the floor in front of him, her haunting screams echoing through his childhood home. She stares up at him, her eyes unfocused and vacant and he clenches his jaw, forcing himself to hold her gaze as the light in her brown eyes begins to fade into unconsciousness. No, no, not yet. He needs her to stay conscious; it's the only reason they will keep her alive. The chandelier falls to the ground, shattering into a million tiny crystals of glass, and she is gone as abruptly as she appeared. He does not see her again for another three hundred and forty-one days, almost a year into the war, but the image of her blood, scarlet and wet and human, trailing down her jaw is embedded in his memory forever.
The second time Hermione learns about war, she feels it in her bones when the bodies begin to drop. Avadas are quick and painless and the most brilliant green she has ever seen, but she soon learns Death Eaters favour curses that sever, slice, maim, and boil the blood in your veins. It is not until Padma's blood is splattered across her shoes that she utters her first curse intending to kill.
The third time, it's toxic and burning in her lungs, black smoke blurring her vision as a severing curse slices a clean line across the side of her face and she collapses to the ground. She awakens with bloody bandages wrapped around her head and cries when Harry tells her she could have died, should have died, if it weren't for the emergency Portkey that brought her directly to the entrance of St. Mungo's. She hugs him tightly and speaks nothing of the silver mask she glimpsed before she fell to the ground and that it wasn't her who activated the Portkey.
The sixteenth, she casts the killing curse without a second's hesitation and does not look back when she hears the resounding thud of a body falling to the ground. She loses Ron in the thickening smoke and retches behind a ruined building, the acrid taste of death lingering on her tongue until nothing remains of her insides.
The twenty-eighth leaves her hair matted with dried blood that is not her own and a numbness that creeps into the marrow of her bones and on the twenty-ninth, she burns their clothes in a fire behind one of the many safe houses she's begun to call home. She stands beside her best friends, their faces hardened by the casualties of war, and watches as their childhood burns before their eyes. She does not leave until the last embers die out.
The thirtieth she pretends is an anniversary. Months have elapsed since the war began, but it feels like her heart has aged ten years in the process. She is tired with a weariness that settles in her spine and an ache in her lungs she feels with each exhale. She exists in an impenetrable darkness, the days bleeding into weeks, time passing rapidly and slowly all at once. She blinks when Dean tells her it's been six months and she is suddenly aware of her hands stained with the blood that is always, always there.
The fiftieth stares at her mirrored reflection as she scrubs her skin raw with dirty soap. She showers every day, refusing to conserve water when she is constantly covered in dust, blood, and grime. Her healed cuts are red once again and she traces the first scars of the war: chest, neck, forearm, thigh, jawline, lower back, cheekbone. She shouts at Lupin when he tries to heal her and insists on wearing them as a testament to casualties of war. The smell of smoke and debris does not fade with time, no matter how many days pass between battles, between improvised funerals for people she has known most of her life, between life and death and the brief moments of chaos in between.
The hundredth time she finds war, Seamus hits the ground with a finality that echoes through the battlefield. He is quivering and afraid, the wound across his chest spilling blood. His breathing is ragged and she holds him tightly to her, whispering words of comfort, of nonsensical things like how it's a better place on the other side and she'll join him soon enough. They bury him beside a towering forest of evergreens the same shade as his eyes and she promises to give him a proper funeral once the war ends, if the war ends.
The three hundredth brings nightmares that wake her with a scream locked in her throat and sweat covering her trembling body. It does not matter which uniform the soldiers are wearing or the weapons they hold in their fists like lifelines. Death takes everyone the same: pureblood, half-blood, Mudblood, Muggle. In the end, they die with no blood at all. She hopes, prays to a god she stopped believing in long ago to end this, end it now before any more lives are taken, before any more children have to die for the mistakes of their fathers. The eerie quiet of death lingers in the air as Hermione shakily stands and crosses an open field, walking between the bodies of the dead and thinking that if everyone could see the bloodstained dirt, the havoc they have wrecked this world with, the chaos and the open battlegrounds, the unmarked graves and the harsh tombstones, war would cease to exist.
The five hundredth, her blood mixes with the cold, wet ground. It's red and brown and buried into her skin. She releases a frenzied laugh, the symbolism not lost on her. This is war, she thinks, bloody and dirty with all of us covered in mud. It isn't glory or sacrifice or a fight for the greater good. War is nothing but the madness to fight and the hunger to win. It is a thousand times worse than any hell that exists and it consumes and burns hotter than the fires of a dying sun. War does not end with the final battle or the resounding cry of triumph when the last enemy is defeated. War is the aftermath in which quiet violence is the most deceitful enemy of all.
The next time Hermione learns about war, Draco Malfoy unceremoniously hits the ground next to her, his body war-ravaged and ruined with blood as muddy as her own.
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