Death is everywhere.
The floor is littered with cold mangled bodies, and I stumble over them in my haste.
"Keep moving". That's what Harry would say. "You have to keep moving Hermione."
I hold back a gag as I come across the colorless face of a girl who I think could be Daphnee Greengrass. You never know for sure, not on the battle field anyways. Her body is twisted, disjointed and mixed in with the others. Her once long beautiful blonde hair is tangled and matted. Sticking in dirty, sweaty clumps to her forehead. Somewhere in the back of my mind I register pain. My knee is torn, dead skin hanging from my kneecap releasing blood to flow freely down my leg. Soaking my jeans and filling my trainers. I trip over someone's lifeless arm, or perhaps a leg, and fall down into the mass of the dead. I scream, tears are rolling down my face. Somewhere in the background I hear frantic shouting, my name I think, they must be shouting my name. My best guess is that it's Harry, or maybe Ron. I can't register what they are saying. Male voices slur together in one continuous stream of incoherency.
They are probably telling me to keep moving. That's what they always tell me, the plan is to never look back, be merciless and don't think of the death, you can grieve afterwards. Right now, you have to be strong; this is the art of war.
Before we left on this mission, they had told me I wasn't allowed to join them.
"It's too much for you." Harry had said "You can't handle it. You've been having night terrors for weeks on end, you haven't been eating, and frankly, you look like hell." He paused, looking determined but slightly regretful about the harshness of his words.
But I was unaffected by them. I have seen too much to care anymore about my looks. Vanity, when you think about it, is really such a petty concept. Besides, I'm not the only one who has been affected by the war. Sometimes at breakfast I study faces, and count the ways in which they have changed. Harry has changed the most. His cheeks have sunken in to his face and there are now permanent dark circles under his eyes. He is constantly frowning, and the bones in his body jut out in sharp angles. Proof of how much weight he has lost. Ron, on the other hand has filled out more rather than gotten skinner. He's still tall and rather lanky, but new muscles have formed in his arms and back that weren't there before. Battle scars run up his arms and you can clearly see a gash that runs from his upper left forehead down to the bridge of his nose. He, like Harry, looks weary and tired most of the time. His fiery Weasley passion and temper have banished, leaving a quiet agreeable robot in its wake. It makes me want to cry. Ginny has recently joined our group, and so I have started analyzing her over cold porridge as well. Ginny has taken the least amount of toll. She hasn't gone out to battle yet. Mrs. Weasley made Ron promise to forbid her, and none of us give her the details on what it's really like to go out. Ignorance, undoubtedly, is bliss. Ginny worries a lot, and sometimes I catch her crying in the bathroom, but she's still as beautiful as she was in school. Her hair's shorter. The fire red straight locks that she had kept down to her waist now fall to her chin. I asked her why she did this and she said it was "more practical." She's still relatively curvy, with full breasts and hips that fan out nicely from her narrow waist. Every once and a while I feel slightly envious, and then I want to slap myself.
At times I stop and look at myself in the mirror, only to find that I'm barely recognizable. My hair, though still wildly curly, has lost most of its body, now the caramel ringlets just sort of fall loosely around my shoulders. My face has lost its youthfulness. Once round cheeks have slimmed considerably, and my jaw line is clearly visible, my eyes look tired, and the healthy blush I once had is gone, leaving no color. Sometimes I even go as far as to look at myself naked. The faint outline of my ribs is just starting to show. My breasts have always been rather small, and the weight loss has done nothing to help that fact. After only a minute of looking I decide to put my clothes back on. I can see where Harry is coming from when he says I'm not taking this well.
"Stop talking nonsense Harry." I bite out, practically seething. "This is not an open debate. I am coming with you and how dare you even suggest such a thing!" Harry sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, he has been doing a lot of that lately.
"Hermione, Ron and I have been talking and-"
"Oh you twohave been talking, have you?" I shrieked, on the verge of hysteria. I placed my hands on my hips. "Well by all means, let's see what unintelligent input Ronald has to give!" I turned to him with my eyebrows raised in expectancy.
I knew I was being a bitch, but I was angry at him, angry at him for changing, for becoming a stranger to me, for not being the warm consistency I could rely on to get me through this war. I hoped is mouth would tighten into a straight line, that his fists would clench, that his face and ears would flush tomato red. I hoped that he would get in my face, that he'd say something completely stupid on impulse of the moment, I'd retaliate, and we'd end up in a huge row for maybe a couple of hours. Because that's what we do, that's what we always have done. But he didn't do any of that. Instead, he looked me in the eye for a couple of moments, his face void of emotion, shrugged and looked away. He just looked away. And I could feel my heart breaking, I could feel my whole world crashing down around me because I loved him for so long, but the boy I fell in love with was gone, he might as well be dead with the rest of them. Harry came behind me and put a hand on my back that was supposed to be soothing. He knew the reason behind my distress, one night he came up to my room and demanded to know the true reason of my hostility towards Ron. I told him, and he put on a mask of sympathy and held me while I cried into his chest, like a two year old.
"Not to mention it's too dangerous." Harry continued, softer this time. "Ron and I, we can look after ourselves. You, on the other hand, go into some kind of shock or something. Don't try to tell me you don't Hermione, because you do, I've seen it. We've almost lost you twice now."
There it is. Harry's one weakness is his fear of losing others.
"I mean, why would you even want to go back out there anyways, since you're being dismissed? I'm sure Ginny could use the company." I turned to look at him, my eyes filled with tears.
I loathe battle, and after this whole mess is done I never want to see one single act of violence again. So no, I definitely do not want to go back out to battle.
But I have to.
This is the part that they don't understand. No matter how many times I try to explain it to them, they just can't seem to wrap their heads around it. I need to be out there, because I'm not going to sit around like a good little housekeeper while I send the only people left in the world that matter to me to their probable deaths. If they die in battle I want to die with them.
I finally got my way, as expected, with lots of arguments leading up to the fact. I promised them I could be strong, that I could kill and not be affected by the deaths. In return they gave me one simple rule. When things get bad, just keep moving.
But right now, face to face with some nameless corpse, I don't want to keep moving. I want to close my eyes tight and disappear. I want to be swinging on the tire swing back at my grandmother's cottage, where I used to spend my summers. I want to be back at Hogwarts, rolling my eyes at some stupid joke Ron has made while helping a laughing Harry with his homework. I hear heavy boots running towards me. Shouts and curses are flying left and right as countless bodies drop down dead, more people dying every second. I feel large, strong hands grip me painfully, nails digging into my biceps as I'm yanked into a kneeling position. Those hands shake me, hard, and I snap back into my senses somewhat. I can feel embarrassment on my cheeks and slowly open my eyes, expecting to see the concerned face of Harry through my tears.
Instead, I find myself staring into the deep black eyes of Severus Snape.