A/N: I hardly know what I'm writing, but all I know is that there was a burning need to put this down into words. It'll get a bit dark, and I'll add trigger warnings when it does, but rest assured, this is not a tragedy, and neither will anything dark happen in the story's present time, for lack of a better word. All dark things will be relegated to mentions of their dark pasts.
She sat herself down on the hearthside, carefully balancing both the book and the mug of tea in her hand, setting it so that, while precarious, it wouldn't spill. She opened the book, and felt a strangely familiar pull at her body, a swing on it's downward descent that took her stomach before the rest of her.
Turns out she needn't have bothered about the mug. It was destined to fall anyway.
She opened her eyes and found herself face down on something musty but exquisitely soft, and let her cheek smooth itself along the surface for a perilously long moment, before mentally preparing herself for death as she rose.
Her eyes met ones, glassy fevered ones, and she nearly flinched at the intensity with which they looked at her.
A face that was fitting and yet immiscible with the image she had of him, the him that she had seen, in memories, books. Photos.
He was ill. The subtle rattle of his exhale betrayed him, even if his pallor, impeccant though it was, shone with the sheen of a waxed mould.
It was all she could do to look at him, to match his gaze with hers even as breathing became something she had to think about. They stared at each others eyes for what, depending on perspective, could have been either the merest blink or aeons.
Finally, he opened his mouth, his idiopathy causing his voice to have a curious rasp to it that she felt through the floor, through the her legs till it reached her ears, her head, the deep set of her bones, so that she was unsure if she was actually hearing him, or simply feeling his words without the air having to carry any of it. "Rest. We will talk later."
His voice broke the ensorcellment, such as it was, and one hand darted to where she would have had her wand. His eyes didn't miss the movement, but he stays silent. Her wand is not there, and somehow, somehow she is prepared for this. She looks at him, and he shakes his head almost imperceptibly; he hasn't taken the wand.
She's assailed by twin feelings of fear and relief, the latter outweighing the former in a way that was alarming. But she was tired. Tired of having blood on her hands, tired of being the one to take lives, however evil, because she stood on the good side. And so if the choice was made for her, so be it.
She got up woodenly off of what she belatedly realised was a persian rug- one with a thread count that probably gave defied counting- and looked around the room. She saw a four poster bed, eerily similar to one she had spent much of her teenage years in, and dropped herself onto it.
She was fatigued, and if death came to claim her while she slept, she would welcome it. And so she gave a damn where Tom went.