Disclaimer: I do not own the copyright to Harry Potter, and would prefer not to be accused of theft. Therefore, get thee gone, lawyers and naysayers!
Warnings: Angst. Also, you will not understand this UNLESS you have read Last Spy. This is set in the other world that Hermione briefly accesses in Last Spy during her initiation.
"Are you okay?" Skye looked up, blinking at the light emanating from the wand held in the concerned grip of someone she thought she knew. Oh. She did. Her mind slowly moved, the same way a too-cold snake does before it warms up, wearily searching for the place she'd stored the name of the girl she knew that she knew.
"Skye, you've been sitting there and staring at the door for the past two days. You need to eat something and get some sleep," the brown-haired witch said worriedly. The only one around here without lines of age and stress…
Still, she stared uncomprehendingly at the girl. "I…I can't. Draco hasn't come home yet."
"Oh—" Skye tilted her head slightly as she watched in bewilderment the girl's face crumple. Why was she so upset?
"Don't cry," she said. "Don't cry, it's okay."
A moment later, the girl was kneeling by Skye where she sat, knees huddled to her chest by the door, and serious soft eyes, dewy with sorrow, were gazing at her solemnly. "Skye, Draco is dead. Remember? It's been four days since we found out. Please, Skye, you can't kill yourself this way," the girl said anxiously, softly.
Dead? Draco, dead? It wasn't possible, couldn't be possible. Draco was full of life, of laughter and teasing and warm arms whenever she needed to be held. Draco couldn't be dead. She'd see him again, his grey eyes sparkling with the latest crude joke he'd told to innocent ears.
She heard a sound like a wounded animal crying. Vaguely, she hoped that someone would put it out of its misery. It sounded close by. She felt something wet on her face. Touching her hand to her cheek, it too came away wet. It trickled by her mouth, and still not understanding, Skye involuntarily licked her lips, tasting bitterness and salt. Tears. She was crying. As her brain struggled to process that, it recognized one more thing. The wounded animal sound was coming from her. She was crying because…because…they'd killed him, killed her Draco and taken away the only good thing in her life. She saw his eyes as if they were before her, and she screamed and screamed and felt the darkness descend on her like a fury.
She woke once, struggling out of the fuzzy black into consciousness where she knew pain awaited her. She heard herself breathing, ragged and harsh, the little mewling noises. Then someone's soothing voice, and cool liquid against her lips. "Drink, it'll help." A familiar voice. Trusting, she drank and fell obediently back into the blessing of sleep.
When she finally woke for real, it was dark. When her eyes adjusted to it, Skye saw Hermione asleep in a chair by her bed, a book still in her lap. Though she felt no inclination to smile—never again!—Skye gently slid the heavy tome off the other girl's lap, placing it on the floor instead. Then she went in search of water. Her mouth was dry as dust, and sour with excess sleep. She could swear she still tasted her tears, though somebody had washed her face of the signs.
Water cooled the desert in her throat, but did not wash away the bitter saltiness that coated her tongue. Skye stared at the empty glass, and the taste on her tongue could not rival the clear, crystallized hatred in her heart. They had killed Draco. They had taken away an innocent man's life, a man who had done nothing wrong but speak out against cruelty. They would pay.
Like hard lumps of razor-sharp diamonds, her plan formed. Others would call it suicidal. She considered it the only path left available for her to walk. When morning came and with it, her friends—all the family she had left in the world, all as broken as she—her plan had set in stone and nothing they said could budge her. They protested, their voices harsh and loud like the sound of people pleading to prove their loyalty to The Chosen One. Harry Potter. The man who had become the monster who had taken and taken until the streets ran red with blood and her dreams ran redder still with incoherent pain and the lust for revenge.
She jinxed the straws, her handy ability hard-won in years of practice finally paying off. They had insisted on the drawing, foolish creatures. They knew, and she knew that they knew, when she dipped her steady, wraith-like hand into the sack and came up with the short straw, that there had never been a real chance that it might be someone else who had less right to it. If they didn't know before, the smile that spread over her face—the first smile since she had been told the news and had gone to see her heart planted on the gate of evil's stronghold, beautiful eyes staring blankly into some distant field, would have told them. The smile was bloodless, cruel, and thin and her friends shuddered when they saw it.
It would haunt their nightmares, that smile.
None of them said a word after that. Not to her, at any rate. She overheard them, occasionally, speaking in whispers as though she could not still listen or comprehend. She was not quite mad, after all. Not yet. She possessed enough sanity to finish the last task she planned to carry out on this cursed earth, and she was plenty sane enough to recognize the whispers around her. She didn't care.
"We can't let her do this, Hermione! It's a suicide mission, and she's…"
"It's a suicide mission for anyone, Dean," hissed the other voice.
"Yeah, but Skye isn't in her right mind," insisted the first.
"None of us are, to undertake this in the first place," the woman scoffed drearily. "I don't want to let her go either, Dean, but there's no way to stop her and…" a long pause, then in a queer, musing tone, "I think if I had been in her place, if they had killed the man I loved, I'd do the same."
"I would, and I did," came a new voice. Cold, clipped, precise. Silence at that. Skye smiled in the darkness of her room where they thought her asleep, the same frightening one she had given as she clutched fateful straw in her skeletal hand. Bethany Pritchard had been one of the last, barring the Other Hermione, to join their little rebel alliance. She had been loyal to Potter for years, for his defeat of Voldemort and his supporters. Her fiancé, a Muggle, had been murdered by the Death Eater Yaxley, and it is said—though she had never ever told—that after the last battle, when they had looked around, they had found her unconcernedly wiping blood off her hands. On the ground by her, they had found the mangled remains of a body too destroyed to be identified except by means of a deep magical scan as Yaxley.
She would understand. She knows. Beth Pritchard had stuck out the first years of tumultuous tyranny for the sake of loyalty to the boy who had killed the wizard whose mad quest for power had come at the cost of her fiancé's life, but when they arrested her cousin, Graham Pritchard, for treason which she knew very well consisted of one thoughtless remark to the wrong person, she had packed up her belongings and found herself a better arrangement. They hadn't been sure to trust her at first, but then who could they trust in these times anyway? A thorough interrogation with Veritaserum, standard procedure for all who wished to join their venture, had proved her trustworthy.
Skye closed her eyes, tuning out the mumbles beyond her door, dismissing them. Let them discuss her. She had bigger things to think of, and rest to catch up on if she was to kill Harry Potter.
He came to her in her dreams, and was by turns furious and loving. In her nightmares, she wept and pleaded as his eyes burned hatred and disgust.
"You let them kill me," he accused, voice cutting as fine and sharp as shards of glass, as the shattered dreams and pieces of her heart. "You did this. It's your fault. Everything you touch turns to dust and death. Just look at your parents and your aunt. You killed them all because you existed. You killed me too. You should never have existed."
"Draco, please, I love you," she screams in those nightmares, trapped by his hate. She cannot deny his accusations, believes them in those dreams because it is true that her family would not be dead if she existed. If she had not existed, her family would not have been there at Hogwarts, desperately trying to find her in the heat of the battle. Her family would not have been there to be crushed by an exploding wall, all three dead in an instant.
He is bleeding suddenly, and his eyes and his nose and mouth spew blood a dull red like rust and over-ripened apples and rot even as he shouts obscenities at her and paralyzes her with his loathing.
Those are the nightmares.
In her other dreams, he comes as the boy she fell in love with, bright hair shining in the sun and laughter in his soft eyes. He smiles and teases her, asking her why the long face and asking her to follow him.
"Come on, Skye!" he calls, slipping away.
"Come back!" she struggles to catch up, but his walk is light and quick, while her steps are somehow slowed as if she walks in mud or wades through waist-deep snow, laboring as she strains towards his vanishing image. "Wait! Please! Draco, wait for me!"
His quick laugh is all she hears as he disappears like a morning fog, and she wakes with tears on her cheeks and gall on her tongue.
That was the night. In the day, she was a woman on a mission and though she really just wanted to storm the Potter stronghold, she wanted victory more. Revenge is best served cold, and the consuming grief was kept at bay, indeed, could be used and transmuted into more useful stuff, by planning with a vicious mind to the details of her task.
Fury and bitterness were cold companions that froze her bones brittle, but she welcomed them for their ability to numb the pain and crystallize the thoughts in her head to pick out only the most essential ones and organize them with clarity. The rest was inconsequential.
Finally, her plans were set and she knew that tonight would be the night. Her hands did not shake and she did not sweat as stood by the door of their hidden home, ready to leave to avenge Draco, but her pulse accelerated and her eyes glittered like hard diamonds with excitement. At last. Before she left, though, goodbyes had to be said. She finally allowed just a little of her rock-hard shield to give.
"Oh, Skye," whispered Hermione (Other Hermione) as she flung her arms around Skye's rigid neck. "I hope you find what you need tonight. Be safe, friend."
"Blessings."
"Go get 'em."
"Be careful!"
"Good luck."
"I have faith in you, Skye."
"Take care of yourself. Don't do anything stupid."
"Come back to us." Wishes, like smoke, brushed past her dazed ears and lingered for a moment before moving off. Skye paused, and swept her eyes over the motley crew she had called the closest thing to her family for years. Their eyes regarded her too—some filled with sorrow, others with worry, pain, and just a few with a solemn understanding that this was what she had to do.
Skye felt a broken shard of her heart tear a little more. "Thank you," she said to them simply. "Thank you for being my family. I love you all." She tried to think of what else to say. "I'm sorry it has to be this way," she finally said, unable to think of anything else. Oddly enough, it seemed like the only closure she might give to her friends. She gave them, for the last time, a true smile—not the grimace that had struck fear into their hearts, but a Skye smile, warm and gentle and teasing like the man she had loved and lost. Then she walked out the door, letting it swing softly back behind her with a click. She took a deep, clean breath of air. Then she set her face towards the stronghold, and did not look back. She had a date to keep, and Draco hated to be kept waiting.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, night night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dreams; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
A.N.: The last is the final stanza from W.B. Yeats' poem, Easter, 1916, which is a beautiful, heart-wrenching poem that I whole-heartedly recommend you look up and read in full. It's available to the general public online, if you just do a quick search.
I am in the process of writing the climactic chapters for Last Spy, but needed a break. Not that this helped any in the angst-attack…