A/N: Why is the story rated as such? Next chapter, perhaps. Thanks for reading!
When Harry wakes up the following morning, the sky is white again – but it is not the white of searing summer heat.
It is snowing.
He blinks a few times before gasping from the piercing sensation of cold on his face. Jerking ungracefully forward, he turns to check on Draco and Blaise (both who seem to have a knack for sleeping really well in adverse conditions). Remembering Blaise's broken leg, he figures he should wake them so they can get him to a warmer place to rest.
He edges himself closer to Draco first, head still spinning from the revelations the blond had showed him last night. In all this new surrealism, he is glad that Draco is clothed in black because his white face and hair blends in perfectly with the snow around them. He feels his heart uncomfortably thrum against his ribs again as he cautiously places a hand on Draco's shoulder to ascertain his existence.
Grey eyes immediately flicker open to stare back at him. Thin lips curve into a mischievous grin and Harry smiles cheerily back. Draco pulls himself to a sitting position and Harry is slightly pleased to find a faint blush spread across Draco's pale face as the other man moves in closer for warmth.
"When you two are done flirting, let me know," he hears Blaise drawl from behind Draco.
Draco laughs softly in embarrassment. Harry feels his insides tingle gloriously with warmth at that sound and tightens his grip on Draco's shoulder to reaffirm again that he is real.
An hour later the mood is far more solemn. The three of them find themselves tense and huddled in a small circle, coats thrown over their backs.
Draco and Harry had earlier tried to get Blaise to walk with them to a better area, but he had not even been able to stand. His broken and cut leg, left carelessly exposed last night, is now completely incapacitated by the unforgiving cold. Harry recalls seeing a light snuffed out behind the man's eyes when he fell back to the ground for the sixth time. Somehow, he is able to recognise that look as an acceptance of a soon death.
However, as much as Harry sympathises and feels guilty for being the partial cause of Blaise's paralysis, he still finds himself growing thin on patience with every useless complaint the man produces. Irrationally, he also finds himself getting angry with Blaise for diminishing his and Draco's survival chances. Because the two of them (or Draco, largely) have chosen to stay with him, they cannot use any sort of magic as the effects would quickly draw the attention of the hunting townsfolk.
"This is not good," Blaise laments for what has to be the tenth time in half an hour. Harry is wholly irritated by now by Blaise's repeating of the obvious. But he bites his tongue; squabbling is as useless as complaining with no action when facing a dead-end.
Harry resigns himself to scraping his hands against the snow and pressing the caught snow angrily into his palms. Draco watches silently, his breath coming out in small puffs.
"It should never snow in July," Blaise mumbles again, distraught playing over his face. His nose looks like it's freezing off, and he is clearly suffering the most out of the three of them.
"Well, of course it shouldn't. Any more enlightening bits of advice you have to offer, Blaise?" Harry snaps finally.
Blaise glares at him, but his mouth is sewn shut. Draco sniffs a little too loudly.
"I'll go make lunch," Harry mumbles quietly, shifting away with his brows knit.
Harry sits back down with a sigh, grudgingly handing out the food rations. The three of them have barely taken a bite into their stale sandwiches when the bushes around them suddenly burst into flames.
Harry and Draco make the mistake of hurriedly scrambling to grab their possessions and covering Blaise. Their loud scuffling of the thick snow does not go unheard by the townspeople.
"They're here!"
Harry hears a whoosh of torches as more bushes are set alight. The flames quickly encircle them, forming a ring of fire. Draco shrieks an ear-splitting scream of fear as he scrambles to pull with Blaise away from the encroaching fire lapping at his feet.
"Let them burn!"
Harry staggers back from the growing mob chant sounding from the other side of the fire, swiveling around like a trapped animal. His pulse is racing and he feels something big stirring within himself.
"Harry! Harry, what are you doing? Come here and help me-!"
He thinks he hears a high male voice screaming for him behind him, but his world is spinning and he can't see clearly enough to locate him. His vision is turning white and he falls back onto the unforgiving snow, unconsciously grimacing as the cold nips away at his hands.
"Harry! Help me, please!"
He scrambles back onto his feet, wobbly, trying to walk toward the source of that voice. He collapses after a few steps. When he looks up, he narrowly manages to dart his face out of the fire in front of him – and that rush of adrenaline is more than enough to trigger off the magical sensation bubbling within him from before.
"AGUAMENTI!"
His surprisingly clear voice echoes throughout the air as a huge gush of water rushes out from the space around him. The waves of water crush the fire in front of him, ending it with a furious sizzle. The snow pelts down even more fervently from the sky and he hears a cry of pain from one of the townspeople as nearby trees begin disintegrating and falling.
"Just rush in and attack the lot of them!"
He recognises that, with a crushing feeling, as the voice of Hermione. But he has no time for tears as a glint of silver shines from the corner of his eye. Without thinking, he whips around and holds out his hand again and yells the words of spells he can't remember learning.
"Expelliarmus! Stupefy! Protego-"
The ball of light in the palm of his hand flits quickly through colours with every new spell. He sees sharp knives and other large household weapons fly off into the distance, some cutting human flesh and tearing limbs callously as they do. Many of the townspeople have started screaming in fear. Some of those in the frontline desperately try to dart back into the safety of the back of the herd; a bad move as more and more of the forest is falling apart with every spell Harry casts. He hears the thud of bodies as they are entangled in vines, drowned in the rapidly piling snow and crushed underneath whole trees.
Amidst all the chaos, the townspeople struggle terribly in regrouping. Harry takes the chance to haul a half-filled bag and scramble back to Draco, who is still clinging onto a partially burned Blaise. The smell of charred flesh, especially at Blaise's legs, is strong. Harry can see the red muscle in some parts where the skin has completely twisted up and dropped off. Blaise is gasping in pain and half-conscious from the severe burning and the feeling of snow covering and biting at more and more of his exposed flesh.
"Quickly…go already-" Blaise hisses furiously, his eyelids flickering shut. His lips are blue and his expression reads of nothing but severe pain.
"No-!" Draco whimpers uselessly, trying to pull him back into a sitting position on his lap. Harry chances a glance over his shoulder and he can see a large shadowy group amassing from the distance away, having retrieved their weapons. The snowstorm swirls unforgiving around them.
"We don't have time, we have to leave now, Draco," Harry says, his heart wrenching in guilt again. He tears his eyes away from Blaise's shivering torn body and stands. Hesitatingly, he jogs a few steps down the path away to make his point. Draco does not look up, his eyes still fixated on his dying friend.
Harry is furious and finds his patience running low again. He half contemplates leaving Draco to just…just die that with that friend of his- he doesn't need to be whinging after a blond boy who doesn't have any sort of survival instinct or tact-
The furious yell of the mob slaps him out of his reverie and again he finds himself snatching a shell-shocked Draco away from Blaise. Harry hurls Draco roughly behind him and out of his guilt decides to defend Blaise for as long as possible. He chants spell after spell, hoping terribly to find one that could kill – but nothing truly harmful ever shoots out of his hands.
He is able to hold back the first flood of townspeople, but soon they are back in almost full strength. Even those missing a limb or hand, or gashed horrendously at the head, are still doggedly moving toward Harry despite their injuries. If the situation weren't so life-threatening, Harry would have laughed at the scene of zombie lookalikes shuffling through a blizzard, a scene which looks straight out of one of the games in his old shop.
"Just fuck off, Potter!" Blaise wheezes from beneath him, with what must be the last of his strength. The townspeople are managing to dodge some of his attacks. Hermione, the lead of the whole raid, looks like a complete animal as she lashes out furiously toward Harry with a butcher's knife, drawing a deep gash into his right arm. Harry stumbles back in shock and pain, Draco catching him in the nick of time.
"GO!" Blaise yells, muffled quickly as the angry mob swarms over his deformed body. There is no resistance from Draco as Harry grabs him with his good arm and forces the both of them into a mad sprint further and further into the snowing forest.
Harry is sickened every time he sees his blood smear against his shirt or land on the white ground. But they never stop until they find a new area with still thick vegetation, an area that looks suspiciously like the literal end of this world.
Draco is panting erratically from their run and crying again as he aimlessly dabs at Harry's arm with a scrap shirt from the bag they managed to bring. Harry simply hangs his head and tries to suppress his nausea and his desire to just cast all the damn spells he can think of to end this world and their misery.
"He's dead! I delivered the last stroke!"
Ron's voice. The crowd cheers. The two of them have left the townspeople far behind but the forest is so silent now the exclamations of joy are heard loud and clear. Harry feels his vision whir again, and Draco's movements against his arms pause.
Harry, despite his empty stomach, vomits onto the area next to Draco. Some of his bile splatters onto Draco's pants, but the blond continues sitting there, not shrinking away at all. Harry, shaking, presses both his hands onto the cold ground and forces himself to look up at Draco.
Draco is staring off to the space next to Harry with a most distant look. His tears have frozen on his white cheeks and Harry thinks he sees the black clouds of hollowed and helpless despair grow in those shining grey eyes.
Harry allows himself to collapse onto the snow. His breath fogs up his glasses and he can feel the remnants of some puke sliding down his chin and neck, staining his shirt. He doesn't even know what to feel now- if he should feel at all.
How does one prepare to face an inevitably soon and painful death?
Maybe Blaise was the best of the whole lot of them. At least he was never cowardly about dying; even in his last several painful days of lumbering around, he never shirked away from his clearly imminent death.
Saviour? Me?
Harry has to fight hard to bite back a bitter laugh, lest they be heard.
So he simply lets the tears slide over his frosted cheeks. He mourns hard and he isn't even sure what exactly he is mourning for anymore. He is vaguely aware of his blood pooling into the snow, and of Draco getting up to go somewhere. He wants to call out to the blond, to ask him to come back, but his blood loss is draining his mind away. His world eventually saps away into blackness, and all he remembers thinking at the very end of his consciousness is that Draco is still not back by his side.