Title: The End of Time
Pairing: Focus on Draco/Hermione, with a history of Hermione/Ron and mentions of Ginny/Harry and Astoria/Draco.
Rating: M, for language, character death, gore and violence.
Summary:
Disclaimer: These characters are owned by J.K. Rowling. I am making zero money.
AN: This is being written for the Doomsday challenge on HPFC. I've got the first three of what should be five chapters written. Deadline is the first of July so this should be completely posted by then. I'll be updating whenever I get the chapters written and beta read.
A very big thank you to my lovely beta: MrsBates93 who made sure that I didn't make anyone out of character or spell everything wrong.
Chapter One – The Lonely Road
Warm, lingering air was so humid that it threatened to drown me with every breath that I took. The sun beamed down upon me, warm and comforting. The grass was wet beneath me and freshly trimmed; its aroma penetrating the air. I could hear the river nearby slowly trickling over the rocks and if I weren't so lazy I would go dip my feet in it.
The breeze was stagnant letting the air feebly push the leaves off the trees a few millimetres in each direction, too fickle to decide which way to blow. And I laid on the ground wasting another summer day.
Her hand slips into mine. So soft and thin it's like the touch of an angel musing with mere humans for fun. I clutch it tightly and the soft tinker of her laughter graces my ears. I savour it, suddenly desperate to gaze upon her once more. My eyes fly open and she's gone.
In her place on the bloodied grass is another harpy. Its claws are digging into the flesh of my hand snapping the tendons and bones that once clutched her. I pulled my hand away letting the claws tear through it completely. I cannot feel the pain.
The beak, a stark black and hooked thing covered in blood with bits of flesh still clinging to it stood at the forefront of the monstrous face. Her eyes are human and the most beautiful shade of clear blue that I could ever imagine though they are hardened. The skin is thick and scaled the same as the two vast wings which emerged from the deformed shoulder blades. Her dress, a soft blue fabric encasing her evil soul, was covered in blood in varying shades of crimson.
For a fleeting moment I thought of getting up and running. And then without hesitation I reached for her and her soft blonde curls. I put my other hand on the grass and lift myself into her grasp. Her claws reach around me cradling me to her body and her beak descends upon my neck. Consciously I know that this is it and I look up at the blue of the sky and the perfection of the clouds high above me and wait. A moment seems to stretch out for an hour and the reality dawns upon me. It's not over yet.
I woke with a start, sat up quickly and hit my head on the windowsill.
"Keep it down would you?" Weasley grumbled.
He sat beside the other window keeping a covert look out. I looked down at my watch. Five hours. Potter and Nott were five hours late. My gaze caught on my ring. I rubbed it with my thumb before I caught Granger staring at me. She looked as though she wanted to say something and after two months I knew the look well. I thrust my chin out daring her to mention it, but she simply shook her head and turned away from me. Could it be after all this time she finally understood me? I laughed at myself. Granger could care less.
"Not back yet?"
"There's been no sign of them," Granger said as she slowly began to prepare a meagre breakfast. "On the plus side there haven't been any signs of the harpies either."
I nodded. I pulled a three legged stool over and sat on it so that I could see out the window. The morning was a foggy one, which was why they hadn't spotted a harpy yet. The sun hadn't gained enough strength to be able to peek through the fog and the clouds. I imagined that the snow would come soon and we'd either die from the exposure or starvation. Of course I couldn't rule out the fact that at any moment a harpy could come out of nowhere and rip the flesh from our bones. It is the most popular cause of death as of late.
"We shouldn't have let them go," Weasley lamented. "We should have gone with them."
We'd argued for hours over the same topic and I didn't feel like hashing it out with Weasley again so I kept my mouth shut and tried to relive my dream for a few minutes. Like all of them it faded as quickly as reality came back to me. I couldn't even recall the smell of the roses on the weak summer breeze.
Granger managed to cook up a weak, cool, porridge that we ate while sitting at our prospective windows all watching the fog slowly lift from the buildings of Hogsmeade. For some reason we'd thought Hogwarts could withstand anything short of another invasion by the Dark Lord. The Dark Lord has nothing on rampaging ex-veela harpy bitches. It took them all of three weeks to take out over half of the wizarding population of Britain and a quarter of the muggle population. Their blood thirst could not be quenched however and at the last estimate the harpies had killed nearly seventy-five per-cent of the entire population. It was hopeless.
"What do we do if they don't return?" I ask softly into my now empty bowl of porridge. My stomach threatened to grumble. No matter how undignified it may be I was hungry.
Granger shot me a look and then quickly looked at her husband. Which reminded me, she was no longer really a Granger and I should stop calling her that. Old habits die hard. She waited to see if he was going to blow up in my face or if he had called it quits and gone into another one of his depressed episodes where he threatens to walk out and be harpy bait. I rather hoped for the latter. He continued to eat his porridge apparently entertaining the possibility that his best friend may now be dead as well.
"We can't stay here forever," I try to reason. "We can't eat the books and while they may keep us warm if we burn them we'll die of smoke inhalation. Not to mention the smoke will be a harpy beacon."
Granger nodded as she brought another small spoonful of porridge to her mouth. For the first time in a few days I truly looked at her. She's pale, her eyes seem to be sinking into her face and she's getting thinner at an alarming rate. I regret finishing my porridge, because she looks like she could use just a little more food. I hang my head and then return to staring out the window.
"We have enough food for at least a few more days."
Of near starving rations, I want to add, but don't.
"If they don't return by tonight then we'll have to go out there."
Weasley looks like he wants to protest, but then he stops. He looks back out the window and I imagine he's wishing to some deity that the fog parts and Potter walks up the path a trail of dead harpies behind him like some sort of muggle action hero. A small part of me wanted the same thing just so that this nightmare would end.
For four hours it didn't happen. Then, all at once in the mid-morning light a screech came out of nowhere, a gaggle of human screams and running feet. We were all up on our feet at once. Granger dropped her book and Weasley reached for the door. I crossed in front of him and put my body against the door.
"Wait," I told him. "We don't know who's out there."
"It's Harry!"
"We don't know that."
With baited breath we waited. Nott came into view first, his shirt torn and covered in blood. He was running at full speed and not more than three steps behind him was Potter, a body flung over his shoulder as he too came barreling toward us. I pulled the door open before Weasley could even get out of the way. I stepped on his foot, but he didn't seem to care. Nott and Potter crashed into the tiny store and I slammed the door behind them.
The harpies circled overhead. I could hear their large wings flapping against the breeze, but they didn't dare try to enter the building. One of the blessings of harpies is that they prefer to track their prey out in the open since their wingspan didn't exactly fit through the average doorway.
"Harry? Harry! Are you okay?" Granger shouted, kneeling on the floor next to him.
Potter was kneeling over the body that he had brought in with him. It was a young boy, who was not more than twelve years old and barely breathing. He had been slashed in the stomach, nearly eviscerated and wasn't long for this world before he went to the next. I turned away.
"I'm fine," Potter said through gritted teeth. "Help him!"
Granger busied herself and I could hear her softly whispering spells and words of comfort.
"They're descending on Hogsmeade like it's their fucking nest," Nott said.
He stood behind me, both of us looking at the dead village and ignoring the dying boy. Nott put a hand on my shoulder and for a moment we pretended as though it were acceptable for us to seek comfort in one another. And then it was gone. He let his hand drop and we separated going to different parts of the tiny bookstore.
Granger remained sitting beside the young boy for hours. She wrapped his abdomen in clean white linen bandages that she had transfigured. Each of his smaller wounds she healed with her wand. From my vantage point at the window I watched as she busied herself with his care from cleaning him to comforting him. Weasley sat beside her, a useless puppy refusing to turn away. He moved every time the boy made a ragged breath or a pitiful moan and then he would settle back into his seat watching his wife work.
His strength amazed me. He continued to take laborious breaths and she fed him a small portion of porridge as the rest of us dined on Honeyduke's candy and butterbeer that Potter and Nott had brought back.
"Will he make it?" Potter asked, as the sun began to dip below the tops of the buildings.
Granger remained silent and stoic. She wanted to say no. I could tell. Instead she wiped the boy's mouth as he coughed up some porridge and blood.
"Perhaps we should think of putting him out of his misery," I suggested.
"You mean kill him?" Potter accused.
"Yes. He's not long for this world and he doesn't deserve to suffer."
"He could survive this!"
I wanted to argue that the only thing that separated his organs from spilling out of his stomach was the bandage that Granger had wrapped around him. Instead I shrugged, inwardly cringing at every pained moan and labored breath that the boy made.
"He's right," Granger whispered.
"What?" Ron asked. "Hermione you don't mean that."
"I do, Ron. He's not going to make it and he could go on like this for hours, maybe even a day. He doesn't deserve that. He's in pain."
"Can't we make him comfortable?" Potter asked.
"We don't have any pain relief potions…"
"I could go get some."
"You're not risking your life again just to get a pain relief potion for a dying boy."
"I'm not going to kill him!"
A charged moment of silence hung in the air.
"I will," I said, stepping forward.
Weasley couldn't be bothered to keep the look of contempt and disgust from his face. Potter looked horrified and angry, but Granger simply accepted it without a word. She nodded and handed me her wand.
"Are we really going to murder a boy? Shouldn't this warrant more of a conversation! We're killing a person here," Potter screeched, looking desperately around the room for someone to stop me.
"He's suffering, Harry. Let, Draco put him out of his misery," Hermione whispered.
"He could live through this," Harry murmured weakly as though he saw that without Granger being on his side there was nothing he could do.
"Even if he did," Granger started, "his recovery would be long and complicated. We would be stuck here until he could be moved and even then when we did move he probably wouldn't be able to run. We have no potions for pain or infection. My magic…"
She stopped herself, her frustration getting the better of her. She was flustered, her face flushed as she pushed a clump of hair from her face.
"The magic is in short supply," I finished for her as my own weak magic gave a hum at the thrill of holding a wand again.
"So expending it on an unforgiveable curse is wiser than wasting it on healing him?" Weasley asked.
I wanted so badly to scream at him. His wife, one of three out of the five of us who still had a wand was nearly drained of her magic. The lack of food and water was exhausting her and her magic was suffering. All of our magic was suffering. It had been months since I'd had a wand of my own and weeks since I'd touched one.
"It would be faster, more efficient and yes, wiser," Nott told him bluntly.
"Leave it to youto look at this so clinically," Weasley spat.
For a moment Nott's hands balled into fists and his face contorted in rage. In the next he was gone, lost in the bookshelves to mourn.
"Ronald! He lost a child," Granger hissed, shocked and appalled at the way her husband was acting.
"He killed…"
"There was nothing that could be done for her," I whispered furiously. "The harpies took her from his arms and he was left to either let her be tortured or to-"
For a moment we all stopped imagining the difficulty in making the decision to kill someone we loved or let them die so horribly. I remember little Amelia, all of three and a vibrant ball of energy. They'd been in Diagon Alley during the first attack. I shook my head trying to get the image of the girl out.
"He had to," I finished flatly.
"So you vote to kill him, Hermione?" Weasley asked.
I wanted to punch him in the face for putting her in this position. He needed to man up and do the job himself.
"Yes."
"I don't," Weasley said.
"It has to be done," I said.
"I'm with Draco," Nott agreed.
"Harry?" Weasley asked.
"I don't want to kill him," Potter said softly. "But I don't want him to suffer."
Potter was always incapable of making a difficult decision. I shook my head.
"Either way he dies," I reminded them. "Whether we let him suffer or not is the question."
Potter nodded.
"I won't be a part of this," Weasley told us and without looking back he walked away into the bookshelves.
Potter took one last sad look at the boy and then followed after him. Nott and Granger stood by me.
I lowered myself onto the floor and sat cross-legged by the boy's head. I set the wand next to my leg. I lifted his head and put it in my lap, softly stroking his dark hair as his breathing hitched a little and he groaned in pain. Under my breath I hummed a lullaby. His breathing slowed just a little.
"I'm sorry, little one," I murmured, ducking my head so that my lips were next to his ear, "rest in peace."
Granger knelt down and took his hand in hers. She pushed his sweaty matted hair from his forehead before placing a soft kiss to his temple.
I picked up her wand and held it in my hand. For a moment I mourned my wand, my parents, my wife and the child in my lap. My hand shook. I looked into his brown eyes as the tears began to pool. I wiped away his tears with my sleeve.
"Avada Kedavra."
He lay limp in my lap.