Hermione falls to her knees in the grass and watches Harry slump to the grass twenty feet away, almost mirroring her for an instant, before he collapses to the ground. One lens of his glasses is shattered, but she can see that the eyes just beyond the glass are wide open and staring. Green as summer grass, green as the sea before a storm, green as peridots laid out on velvet, as deep and dark and green as all of the deadliest curses. Those eyes are open, staring, blank; empty of all the things that gave them their fire.
I did that, she marvels.
She looks down at her hands, at the wand clutched in the right one, at the cuts and bruises on the palm of the left one. There is a mixture of dirt, grit, and blood under her nails.
All around her, the battle continues on. She doesn't move, and as long as she does not notice anyone or anything around her, no one and nothing notices her.
Someone screams Harry! and Hermione thinks it might be Ginny. There are voices raised in rage and colored curses flying everywhere, the smell of blood, metallic and sharp, and just under that, the smell of earth.
Hermione looks back down at her hands and watches her fingers like they don't belong to her as she closes them into tight fists, then slowly, almost like a flower blooming in the sun, opens them again, splaying them out. There is that same mixture of blood and grime in the creases between her fingers.
A body, cloaked in black, wearing a silver mask falls to the ground beside her. She doesn't flinch or move away from it, merely regards it as one might a strange bird that had just fallen from the sky, or an oddly shaped rock she had come upon while walking on the beach. That it is the body of a Death Eater does not even enter into her thoughts. She is not looking at it like that because it was once a Death Eater, she is looking at it like that because it was once a man.
When the rain starts to fall, it takes her a while to realize that the world has suddenly gone silent. It is an abrupt thing, more startling in its strangeness and finality than the previous screams of anger.
Then that silence is broken by more screams, and it does not surprise her at all that they are screams of anguish, not anger and terror.
"How could you!" a woman shouts, and that gets her attention, because there is the rage again. Rage coating pain and despair.
"Ginny?" Hermione murmurs. She looks up and meets the young woman's tear filled, angry eyes over the prone and lifeless body of Harry Potter.
"Hermione," someone says, and she feels a hand on her arm, pulling her up. "Hermione? Are you all right?"
"Ron?"
Ron shakes her. "Hermione, what happened?"
"I . . . I—"
"She killed him," Ginny says fiercely. "I saw her."
Hermione looks at her, sees her grief, her anger, her tears. Her tears have left trails in the dirt and dust from the battle. She sees all of this, and feels nothing.
Ron shakes her again, roughly, his fingers biting into her arms, hurting her. "Is that true?" he demands. "God, it can't be—is that what happened? Hermione, answer me, damn you!"
"I think—yes," she says, trying to force herself to focus. Distantly, she knows that she is experiencing severe shock, but she can't seem to make anything matter. Not even with Ron gripping her like he is seconds away from hitting her, not with Ginny crying out her grief into the cold dust of the battlefield.
"Ron, stop it, you're hurting her," someone says. It isn't Ginny. It sounds like Fred, or maybe George. She can never tell.
"Why, Hermione!"
"Why?" she repeats, tasting the word like she's never heard it before.
"Yes, for fuck's sake, why!"
"Ron, let her go," Fred/George says. "Let go."
And suddenly he does, and she almost slumps back to the ground, but catches herself on the sleeve of Fred/George's shirt. He reaches out and steadies her, then turns back to Ron.
"Calm down, mate," Fred/George tells Ron. "Just calm down."
"Why, Hermione?" Ron asks again, a note of desperation in his voice. "Just tell me why?"
"She did it for him," Ginny snarls.
Hermione looks up and sees that Ginny is pointing a finger angrily at someone. A man who is getting slowly to his feet. He brushes dirt off of the sleeve of his robe, then starts walking toward her, and she watches because she can't help it. It has always been that way.
"Malfoy!" Ron yells, almost in her face again despite Fred/George's attempts to restrain him. "You killed Harry for Malfoy? Why?"
"To save him," Ginny says. She has pulled Harry's body so that his shoulders are resting in her lap. "She did it to save him. Harry was going to kill him."
Silence at that, then another voice, she thinks it's Neville, says, "Why would Harry want to kill Malfoy?"
"Why wouldn't he?" Ron says.
"Ron, Malfoy's on our side," Fred/George reminds him.
Hermione is barely listening to them. She is watching Draco cross the field. He ignores the conversation around them as though he does not even realize that he and his loyalties are the topic under discussion. He locks eyes with her and has almost reached her when Ron pulls away from Fred/George and raises his hand to strike her.
She does not flinch from him as his hand descends, merely looks at him expectantly. The blow does not fall.
In an instant Draco is there between them. Moving with a catlike agility that his previous calm grace had not even hinted at, he seizes Ron's hand and presses the tip of his suddenly glowing wand to his throat. "Try it Weasley," he hisses, "and I'll hex you so fast your eyes will cross."
Hermione's curly hair has fallen across her face and she stares through it, looking between the two men with wide amber eyes. Ron swallows and she watches in morbid fascination the way his throat works against the glowing tip of Draco's wand. Suddenly, Draco shoves him away, and he would have fallen if Fred/George hadn't been there to catch him.
"You would trade Harry for this . . . this, bastard!" Ron shouts at her, jerking away from his brother.
"Ron," Neville says calmly. "Ron, I think he was hit with the Imperious Curse."
"I don't care if he was," Ron says. "I'd still trade a hundred of Malfoy for one of him. Why couldn't you just—?"
"What Weasley?" Draco murmured dangerously. "Why couldn't she just let him kill me, is that what you were going to ask? Not very fucking Gryffndor of you to be thinking such things, is it?"
"Fuck off, Malfoy."
"Sorry to disappoint you, Weasley, but you're not my type," Draco says with a cold sneer.
Ron lunges at him then, his wand forgotten, as it seems to sometimes be when his temper gets the best of him. Fred/George grabs him around the waist and hauls him back with a curse.
"Ron, this is really not the time or place for this—"
"She killed Harry!" Ron screams, practically in his brother's face. "For Malfoy! She killed Harry for Malfoy! I just want to know why!"
Silence. Everyone seems to be looking at her, for an answer, for a reason, for something, anything. What was the question?
Hermione looks at Draco, who is the only one not watching her for an answer. She lifts a trembling hand and touches the side of his face; lets her fingers linger there until the corner of his mouth curves up just a little.
Ron backs away in horror, his eyes wide with sudden comprehension. He bends forward and puts his hands on his knees and his head down. "I think I'm going to be sick."
"How could you?" Ginny says again, but this time it is almost a whisper.
It was really very easy. Much easier than she could have ever imagined, and she almost tells Ginny that, then doesn't.
How could she not? How could she not, when the marks of his fingers were still set in her skin, when she has only to close her eyes and cast her mind back a few hours to feel the hands that made them moving along her body, holding her down, guiding her. When she has only to look at him to recall the taste of him, the feel of him so full, moving within her; soft words whispered against her mouth between kisses, and touches that burn and strive in vain not to linger.
She knows the soft satin of his skin, the sleekness of the muscles beneath it, the sound of his voice in the darkness; murmured endearments and encouragement, a hiss somewhere between pleasure and pain as she sinks her teeth into his shoulder, her body tightening around him in every way. She knows the taste of his sweat and the sound of his laughter. She knows that he has a mole on the inside of his upper right thigh, and that if she puts her mouth there just so, he will gasp her name in the sweetest way. She knows that he has a scar along the back of his left shoulder from a fall he took off a broom when he was six. She knows that until very recently, it was the only unnatural blemish on his lovely pale body. She knows that he is ticklish along his ribcage and at the backs of his knees, and she knows that he likes her to tickle him anyway, because tickling often leads to something else. She knows that the moment before orgasm overtakes him, his eyes flutter, then search out hers and try to hold her gaze. She knows that it never works; that his back arches and his eyes close, always, in spite of his every effort to control it. She knows that he has memorized every dark spell that she has ever heard of, and some that she has not, because he firmly believes that it is nothing but sheer ignorance not to know ones enemy and their weapons. She knows that there is a piece of him inside her, and that every day it is slowly, miraculously growing.
Knowing all of this, how could she be expected to stand back and watch him die if she could save him?
Hermione turns to Draco and he reaches out and pulls her against his side. He holds his wand lightly in one hand as he leads her away from the field, ready to use it if anyone tries to stop them. Nobody does.
The war was over now. Somewhere on this field of carnage lay the body of Tom Riddle, and with him, the war has ended.
But victory is bitter sweet, marred by the many deaths of the brightest and the most valiant of them all. Tomorrow the world would celebrate the end of a long reign of terror, but that celebration would be overshadowed by the knowledge that their shining hero lay dead in his grave, the only payment for his bravery a cold coffin and a dark hole in the ground.
It occurs to Hermione to wonder who had delivered the killing spell to the Dark Lord. Not Harry. Harry had been fighting him when he was hit by the Imperious Curse. Perhaps Neville? That seemed fitting, in a way, and she hoped that was how it had happened. And wouldn't that be ironic?
"Are you cold?" Draco asks her.
"A little," she says. She burrows in deeper against his side when he wraps his cloak around her shoulders. He smells of earth and magic, but just under that there is a sweet tangy smell that is all his own, and it makes her think of apples just after the rain.
She knows everything about his skin and his flesh, and she is probably the only person who knows even half of what is underneath it.
The world would condemn her for this knowledge if they knew what it had cost for her to keep it. No matter what curses and spells he had been under at the time, the world would remember that she had brought down their Chosen One to save the life of a man who had been branded with the Dark Mark. They could not arrest her for it because, after all, this was war, and war was about death—when it got right down to it, that was all that it was about—but they could ostracize her, and they probably would.
She would not be forgiven.
"Are you ready?" Draco says.
She looks at him strangely for a moment, then understands what he is asking and says, "Yes."
"Hold onto me," he says.
"Yes," she says again and squeezes him tight.
They disapparate, leaving the smell and the taste and the gore of battle behind them. They will have more battles to fight tomorrow, of a different kind, but that is tomorrow, and it can wait.
A/N: I have decided to continue this story. There is a second part, but due to restrictions on content, it has been published at AFF, and you can find it there. Iam sorry for the inconveiniance. Be aware; it is now rated NC-17 for sexual content.