She was still rushing, knowing that with every breath she took her Professor got closer to his last. Her feet moved but they seemed to move so slow. Like the ground just moved under her feet not letting her get where she wanted. She pushed harder, her muscles protesting against the overuse. She resisted them, using her sheer willpower to keep her moving.

Wands flung spells off walls next to her, breaking off chunks of it and tossing it behind her. She couldn't care less about who shot them and why. She had something she had to do. Something that she couldn't refuse. Something that drove her feet and made her breathe.

It was as if something was giving her strength, something was holding her, pushing her and with winged feet she soared across the grounds, the transition from stone floors to grass registering on a higher level. She felt the wind and the rain, which had started as though the heavens themselves were crying. As though the heavens felt her desperation...or they were supplying her with the things she began to feel when she brushed them off her cheeks. The sight before her must have been the reason.

She was too late....she was too late.

Harry and Ron were running towards her, Ron's eyes blinking in the moisture that flowed down his face from the sky. Harry's hand was red as though he had been biting it.

"Hermione, where in Merlin's name...?!" Ron threw this broken sentence at her and she had to grip the earth with her toes to stop moving.

"What happened?" she asked her voice breaking.

"He's dead, Voldemort killed him." Harry informed her with the knowledge she'd rather not have heard. "There was nothing we could do. He gave me this though." Harry held up a flask, one she hadn't seen before. It was bent in an odd manner, as though whoever had made it had been distracted.

"No." she felt her lips press out, her tongue feeling the wet air as she licked her dry, cracked lips.

"Hermione, Harry has to find out what that memory is before He starts attacking again. Come on!"

She hadn't realized they had walked past her til then. She looked up, seeing that she was shorter than them. Her knees were wet, her shirt sticking annoyingly to her chest. She shook her head, water cascading down her cheeks from her eyes and the rain.

"No." she mumbled again, her body stuck between standing and falling to the wet earth, ready to sink in.

"Hermione, let's go!!!!!" Ron screamed at her, tugging on her arm forcefully. She fought him, unlatching his fingers, knowing a bruise would be there when this was all over.

"NO!!!!"

Ron looked at her funny, his brow furrowed. Harry just stared, half his body ready to run. She nodded to his pleading eyes.

"Go."

He nodded back, taking off. Ron called to him, but he didn't turn. Hermione rose off her knees to her feet, shoving Ron to where Harry had disappeared.

"Go!" she ordered. Ron hesitated. She sighed, shoving him harder. "Go!" he moved and she pushed him even harder."Go, you mindless git!!! GO!!!"

He went, leaving her where she was. She stayed there for a couple more seconds. She wanted to follow them, to forget her own mindlessness. She had an obligation to see Harry to whatever end. Was she taking back all the years she protected him by abandoning him when he most needed her? Was she turning her back on Harry for a man that neither cared nor thought of Harry's safety if not for his own gain?

Was she about risk everything she'd built around herself for one man? One man?

She didn't have to answer that question or any of the others because her feet turned her towards the Shack, her toes catching random tufts of the wet grass and slipping. She never fell though, her time spent on her knees was gone. She again had spent too much time doing unnecessary things.

Her lips moved against each other making words. But sound had changed to nothing. She heard nothing. Not the rain, her feet against the grass, the fighting voices and actions of the people far away, not even her own heart. She heard silence. Like the eye of the storm. Calm had set in around her and she used this push of unblocked land to reach the Willow and slid nimbly into the hole before any branches could attack her.

The crawl to the Shack was even quieter than the outside. But then again it was louder, seeing as she started to hear her heart.

"I'm coming, I'm coming...." she thought, trying to reach the man at the end of the tunnel, most likely laying in a pile of undignified bloodshed and pain. Most likely laying in the ugliest house, with the dirtiest floor, sightless eyes looking into the nothingness he probably expected to see on the other side of whatever this that we call life is.

She couldn't stand the image that implanted itself on her lids when she finally broke through the end of the hole.

"No." she yet again mumbled, her tired body falling to the floor.

She crawled the rest of the way, the room shrinking so that there was no difference between the hole that led here and the room itself.

His body was draped oddly, like a carpet moved up by someone's foot. Turned and battered, the Potions Master she knew was lost in this wrecked silouette of a man. Tears still poured from her eyes, and she knew without a doubt that she cared for him. Not like love, he hadn't yet earned that from her, but the sort of care one would give a friend, a mentor, someone they thought highly of.

It was not beyond her to say that she thought highly of Severus Snape. She felt as though she understood him a bit. Like seeing meaning in a Picasso portrait. Something in the man that lay before her made her imagine such things.

Professor Snape, a Picasso. She could see the similarities. The way he hid things behind false looks and words, the rare occasion when you could see him in his true form, when he was making a potion.

She had learned much from those times, the times when he would grace them with shows of his brilliance, his prowess in the arena of potion making. She could see him now, a filmy version cloaking the empty corpse in front of her.

She knelt by him, dragging him to the wall behind her. She set her back against it, laying him in her lap, his blood soaked neck staining her shirt. His hand were loosely dangling by his sides, blood on them as well.

She touched her hand to her pocket and pulled out the objects she had acquired from his stores. She set them in a little row, like surgical tools.

First, she grabbed the anti-venom of snakes. It was by great luck she'd found this...or perhaps not. Her hand hesitated on the flask, wondering if he had seen this coming. Maybe he had, maybe he had not, she was not going to let that stop her from saving him. Even if he did want to die.

She drained the potion into his throat, watching a little of it shoot out his open neck. Did the snake really bite that deep? How had she know Voldemort would use the snake? She shook her head, ignoring the wierd feelings going on in her head, as though she was having a wicked bout of deja vu'.

She threw the empty flask of anti-venom to the other side of the room, opening the next object. It was Dittany. She rubbed this over the wound, watching it seal up from the inside out. She set the half full flask next to her other side.

The wound closed, she drained a whole bottle of Blood Replenishing Potion into his mouth, coaxing it down by rubbing his stoic throat. He was cold. She shook off the fear she felt and held him closer to her. He could take her warmth as long as this worked. She tossed the bottle of the last potion into the corner she'd thrown the other in. Her wand met her fingers before she thought of it.

"Ennervate." She felt herself shake when he didn't move.

"Come on." she whispered into his ear, moving herself so that he was flat against the ground. She tilted his head back, barely stopping to realize what she was doing as she blew precious air into his unmoving lungs. His chest rose, but fell just as quickly. She nodded to herself, will keeping her vision clear enough to see.

She beat his heart for him, more or less punching his chest. She paused every so often to breathe air in him, then she was back at work. Over and over, she worked her muggle magic. Over and over she forced herself to hope. But he never responded.

Losing her own strength rapidly she held him, closing her eyes and thinking of one place she wanted to be. It was a remote area in a forest somewhere, where she and the other two had camped. She was there two seconds later. She laid him next to a tree and warded the area. She covered him with a green and brown cover she had conjuered to match the place in which he was, then she marked the tree with a white band that covered it's trunk where he was.

She sighed, unable to take her eyes off him for fear he would be gone when she turned around. She shook off that fear Apparating to a nearby hospital.

In the hospital she found a defibrillator and holding onto a hospital bed with the machines she'd need to monitor his vitals with noise on it, she Apparated back to the forest. She knelt down to him, glad this defib worked without being plugged up. She turned it on, letting it reach maximun power.

Once it reached the level she wanted, she ripped open the man's shirt, exposing his chest. She placed the cold paddles on his chest feeling the power flowing into him. His chest rose and fell. She growled and upped the jolt, hitting him again. His chest rose and fell again, his lips spreading as he took in breath on his own but they were shallow. It was better than nothing.

"I wasn't going to let it end like that..." she mumbled. Laying him on the bed and placing the instruments at his feet. She thought of a place she knew would be empty.

A/N: I have the feeling that this will be more than ten chapters. There goes my idea....Ah well, good news for you guys and gals!(and, I'll admit it, good news for me too!)