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SPIDERWEB Chapter 11 - Pieces of me, pieces of you
"Mama, my slipper!"
"Rose, don't stop!" Hermione shrieked, and clenched her fingers tightly around her daughter's frozen hand, not caring if the shoe was lost forever, or if Rose had to keep running barefoot.
She kept pushing against the crowd.
Pulling on her little one, protecting her with her body, and knowing that Hugo, her eldest son, was following them closely. Even so, every few steps she looked back, searching for his rumbled red hair.
Her pulse was a frantic torrent, a hysterical cry. Never before had the barriers of Hogwarts been so severely damaged. And now, she understood the mistake of having been cradled by a false sense of security.
The possibility she may lose any of her two children …
She gritted her teeth.
Now the safest option was to get to the room of requirements.
But Hermione and her family were not the only ones trying to find a safe heaven.
Around them, like a swarm of ants, men, women and children, ran around, trying be the first to seek shelter.
Panic had stripped them of their humanity, leaving only the beasts that we are all in the essence, and who value little, or nothing, more than their survival and that of those who are dear to them.
The crowd sounded like a pack of hungry dogs; Cries and shrieks ... and barely comprehensible insults.
At the rate the tremors were coming, not everyone would have the time to flee.
And the marabunta knew it.
Another new vibration began to rise from the floor, ascending through the partitions of the walls, murmuring in the stone; a hiss like a thousand insects...
A warning in their own bones...
"Another quake!" Someone shouted.
People threw themselves even more violently forward, like a huge wave. No one seemed to mind crushing the others.
Rose shrieked.
A long, sharp moan of childlike terror.
"MAMA!" She also sensed what was coming, even if she was too young to understand.
A man two heads taller than Hermione, hit her violently with his elbow in the ribs, throwing her against a column. Pain exploded on her side, hot and wet, and she was about to collapse.
Rose's small feet, now one of them barefoot, stumbled as they tangled in the edge of her nightgown ... her mother's inert hand slipped out of her small fingers, too young to be able to grasp with the necessary strength.
Terror made her cry ... People kept pushing her.
She stumbled.
"MAMA!"
She close her eyes…. and the heat of Hugo's presence made her look again.
"Hugo!"
Her older brother lifted her in his arms, wrapping her with his ungainly body- that of a child halfway to being a man- still in striped pajamas. And he threw himself forward loaded with her, pushing and struggling, to reach their mother, with a rictus on the lips that went beyond fear or anger, to be pure determination.
"Mom!" Hugo called.
Hermione, still dizzy, clenched her teeth, struggling to join her children.
The three of them managed to get together in the midst of the nightmare, when the walls, the floors, the ceiling... shuddered, vibrated, and moaned, like a huge dying dragon. Everything shook violently. The ground cracked, opening gaps in their path. And only the joint effort of mother and son, made the three of them take shelter under the arcade of a door, avoiding by a few steps falling through one of the cracks.
Others were not so fortunate.
Nearby, the man who had hit Hermione slipped when another man trying to save himself, grabbed his leg desperately, and fell, dragging him along.
Mione reached out, trying to help... but her fingers brushed against the frayed edge of a coat, before they disappeared downstairs.
"Let's go!" Cried Hugo.
Hermione looked away from the crack with difficulty.
Around them, Hogwarts seemed to be collapsing. Trying to move forward would be crazy, but if they stayed they were dead.
Then she saw it.
A window.
It was not much, a burlap barely wide enough for an adult to fit. But even if they managed to get out, the Death Eaters could still be outside, waiting.
Hermione looked around one last time.
"Come!"
They ran among the crown. Thanks to Merlin the window was not far from them.
By the time they reached it, stone had begun to break from the ceiling, a shower that barely missed them, pressed as they were against the wall by the window.
Hermione tasted rock dust on her tongue, the salty taste of sweat, the bitter aftertaste of fear from dozens of people.
The sound of crying and the screams of so many together were unbearable, a howl that seemed to have no end.
"Bombarda!" Cried Hermione, the wand in her numb hand. And the window pane exploded out.
The ground around them began to collapse.
"You first Hugo." She called.
Their gaze met for a second, and Hermione saw that her son wanted to protest. Perhaps, offer himself, to stay behind while his sister and mother escaped. But he must have seen something in his mother's eyes, and he kept his words.
His teenage body, tall, ungainly, and yet strong, in ways that someone so young should not yet be, easily slipped through the opening.
They were on a second floor, and the fall might have been dangerous, however there was a sill on which to lean. And that Hugo used to sit, and look inward.
"Take Rose." Hermione lifted her little daughter in her arms, to pass her through the window, into the outstretched arms of her older brother.
"No, Mama, no," pleaded the baby girl clutching her nightgown.
Rose looked at her with wide, frightened eyes, her messy carrot-colored curls, scattered around her face, like a pile of woolen strips, and the little body, wrapped in a discolored old nightgown, trembling.
She looked as fragile as a kite in the storm.
Hermione tenderly pulled back the curls of her face. Struggling to offer her a reassuring smile, even though everything around them was coming down, and the terrible fear she also felt.
"Fear not, sweetie. Hugo will take care of you." Rose's hands slackened a bit, and Hermione lifted her carefully, passing her to Hugo.
"Now you, Mom," his eldest son called. But she denied softly.
"No, someone has to bring you down."
"MOM! WHAT DO YOU DO?! NO!" The boy had wanted to grab her, but he already had Rose in his arms, and he could not risk losing an arm from the embrace.
"Hugo ..." Hermione's voice sweetened terribly, almost breaking. And her hand rested on his son's arm, inadvertently, through the window. "Please, Hugo ..." She gazed down at her younger child, cradled between them, "look at your sister."
Hugo lowered his pupils a moment, to the huge hazel irises.
"... Hugo ... I'm scared." Her voice was as small and sharp as a bird's. Rose was crying.
"Take care of her." Muttered Mione.
The redhead seemed to shrink in himself, and collapsed into his mother's words.
"No ..." He whispered, his cheeks moist with tears that he did not know he was pouring.
Hugo, in his blue-and-white striped pajamas, wrinkled and dirty, his feet wrapped in furry slippers. With his messy reddish hair, and the freckles that splashed his face, and that had not changed since he was just a baby, looked like a child again. But he was not.
He was a very young man, one who had seen too much.
And Hermione felt a deep pride for this young man, in whom his little one had become.
"I love you. Movilicorpus!"
When only two meters remained to reach the ground, the roof collapsed with a gigantic roar.
oOo
Remus shrieked in the midst of the hurricane of howls, cries, moans, screams, explosions, orders ...
The wall vibrated, shuddered, warped dangerously. On the verge of collapse.
Ron drew out even more of his magic, drawing it from every corner within him where there might still be something to give; The marrow of his bones, the heat of his blood, the tips of his fingers and his feet ... to support the wall for another minute, a few seconds more. Just enough that Remus, and the group of wizards he led, could prop it up. If it fell, the second floor would not hold for long. And after it all the others would fell.
"Damn it!" He shouted, for he could do nothing else, all his attention and power concentrated on the wand and energy beam that embraced the wall, like shoring partitions.
He could feel his body go numb, and the heat leave him. He staggered, managed to hold himself, and groaned at the effort. The stone growled with him, like a huge dying animal.
Remus and his group cast one spell after another, creating a perfect network of magical energy, which merged with the stone and anchored it, like a second skin to harden it. But Ron couldn't give more. Even so, despite the weariness, the helor that was seeping through his pores, the increasingly unreal sensation of the world dissolving in delirium around him, he forced himself to continue holding the spell. And only when his own heartbeat began to fade, finally, he surrendered, and fell to his knees, hopelessly wanting for the wall to no fall.
"Well done Ron!"
"What ...?" He looked up, vision clouded by the icy sweat running down his forehead, and that clung to his temples in thick drops of exhaustion.
The wall was standing. Shored up.
He realized he had Remus' hand on his shoulder. He looked up at the tired lupine, and smiled barely, on the brink of collapse.
"I have done it."
Remus smiled too, definitely fatigued, but still on his feet. His nature allowed him a resistance, that a normal wizard could not hope to have.
"Rest Ronal, you did very well."
"You have seen...-" but Remus was gone again, in the fray of refugees, members of the order, and wounded, who were trying by every mean, to prevent the collapse of the last refuge of light. "- ... Hermione and the children?"
oOo
Sirius screamed, warning the people fleeing through the floo.
Outside the room, the ceiling was collapsing. He turned to look inside, to the people who had not yet had time to escape. An adult wizard pushed the pair of children in line waiting for their turn, and tried to reach the floo before the collapse caught up with them.
Chaos broke out around him. The ground vibrated violently and the little ones squealed.
Sirius entered crowd, violent and terrible. Even in the terror of the moment, those who knew who the brave sorcerer was, stepped out of his way.
He grabbed the man by the collar of his robe, and threw him to the side, slamming him violently against the wall.
A huge fragment of stone collapsed from the ceiling. People howled.
"RUN!" He shouted to the children.
The floo area was collapsing.
He started to run to Dumbledore's office.
oOo
(Harry)
Darkness.
Exhaustion…
The unpleasant, heavy, wet sensation of something pulpy piled against him, beneath him, over him, that would not let him move.
The sound of drops crashing against rock: pic, pic, pic. And the smell-the air that entered his lungs, in cold, pasty puffs, which reeked of corruption, putrid things, the deeply unpleasant stench of decaying flesh, and the toxic, rusty scent of coagulated blood.
Like breathing inside a slaughterhouse.
He groaned.
Struggling to push the darkness out of his brain. And the burning in his muscles, the discomfort in his gut, slipped from the darkness into the light of his conscious mind. Craning to the marrow of his bones, swimming in the cavity of his brain.
He uttered a grunt of complaint, still not quite alert.
More and more awake, other nuances began to be discernible under the stench of the massacre; The aromatic scent of fear and panic, the musty odor of stale sweat, the acid stench of urine ... the fresh scent of Draco in the midst of putridness.
Clear rain on the sticky stench.
"Malfoy ..." He blinked, opened his eyes, in a gesture of reflex.
There was nothing to illuminate, but the darkness could not stop him from seeing, his arachnid eyes catching it all ... and what he saw, completely activated his sleeping brain.
Everything around him was a bloody uterus.
Dark sticky liquid, similar to molasses, a substance almost coagulated, slowly slipping through walls made of rubble, chipped wood, broken stone.
Bathed all the surface of the cavern formed around him.
Debris agglutinated by a brown reddish mass, like rusty motor oil, which was nothing but human remains.
Raw flesh, chipped bones, torn fabric, and the intimate fluids of the inside of the body, united to create a macabre cement.
Dead bodies that barely seemed human.
Seeing all this short-circuited his brain, and struck the broken puzzle of his memory, like a hammer, until it fit again in a devastating way. And he remembered ... The attack, the avalanche, the desperate drive to protect ... "Malfoy." Sharp images such as mental pictures.
His spider part, conjured the protective instinct to bite with sharp fangs his nape, and remind him of what contained his legs closed with the force of a cage.
"My partner." Whispered the widow.
"A Death Eater, a spy, a murderer, a manipulator ..." remembered the human part. "Two things certain." The guardian whispered. But at this moment the need to know if Malfoy was all right, relegated the three strands to the background.
Carefully, he untangled his legs, to reveal an unconscious Draco Malfoy, hidden under the shelter of his body.
The sticky blood that soaked everything, had slipped between his legs, and fallen on him; Bathing his skin in red and black, seeping into the strands of his hair, cradling in the hollows of his flesh.
Slipping along the edge of his parted lips, as if to alleviate a thirst still asleep. And hung in delicate drops like carmine dew, on his eyelashes. There was so much blood that it was impossible to tell if part of it was his.
Harry swallowed, watching ...
The chest rose and fell. Malfoy's breathing deep and rhythmic, with no hiss or gesture on his face (red, serene mask) that could indicate pain.
The green pupils scanned the figure from head to toe, looking for any small anomaly that pointed to the presence of a wound... The damp cloth adhered to his body like a second bloody skin. Outlining every hollow and sharp angle, every shape, small detail, of the physical shell, of that frozen mind.
He averted his gaze, suddenly aware of desire coiling like igneous tongues in his gut. Harry caught the sharp hunger, and brushed it aside.
Now was not the time, nor the place for the instinctive reflection of his spider.
The next few minutes passed, little by little, seeing if the rubble could stand alone, without the support of the mass of his widow body.
Once confident, he let his body move to the hybrid form that was his natural shell. The change, always so smooth, slid over his body with the ease he expected ... but something was not right. Something ... when his new form settled, his legs failed him and he dropped to his knees by Malfoy's unconscious body.
"Something is not right." He felt weak, too weak.
He shrugged his shoulders, gently, trying to adapt himself to the curves and joints of this shape, and the pain, briefly asleep until then, perhaps from shock, awoke and fluttered down his spine, vertebra to vertebra, until his whole back burned, inside out, in an electric spark.
With a choked groan, Harry collapsed on palms and knees, shivering and shuddering. The reflex of holding himself, tightened the muscles of his body from his legs to his arms, and the suffering multiplied until an inarticulate scream was torn from him. Forcing the hybrid to lean his forehead against the bloody stone.
His arms trembled violently, barely supporting his weight.
By the time the pain had subsided enough to allow him to think, sweat beaded the surface already covered with blood, of his chitin, and his body shivered violently.
Getting to sit was exhausting. The agonized work of several minutes, concentration and suffering, which left him feeling fragile as eggshell. He barely managed to look over his shoulder at the area that seemed to be the most painful ...
Oxygen stopped in his windpipe.
Broken.
The chitin that covered his spine ... was a crushed mass, broken inward, of pieces like blades of black glass, stuck in the crushed flesh. Blood and other greenish-yellow fluids suppurated between them on what was left of his back. Slipping through strands of tissue, and splinters of bone, repugnantly.
His armor was hard, but apparently not so much as to safeguard it from the impact of several tons of stone.
He looked away, his stomach twisting. And he thought, vaguely, in the hysteria scaling his epidermis, if he had not swallowed some slugs ... He shook his head, dispelling the strange, almost delirious, idea. Recognizing it for what it was.
A symptom.
'I have a fever.' Soft fatigue, dizziness, weakness, and now the onset of delirium ... He closed his eyes. 'I've been unconscious for too long.' Long enough for the wounds to become infected in that septic environment.
He needed healing.
Harry opened his eyes again, trying to conjure up his magic. But he was too weak, and drunk with pain to concentrate.
He was getting dizzy.
He collapsed on his side, without strength.
Needing help.
oOo
Draco awoke with the sensation of his lungs dry as gravel, his body aching, his flesh bruised, wet and sticky.
Instinctively he tried to sit up, but his limbs, soft, slipped in the viscous substance that covered the floor, forcing him to lie down. It felt like he'd had too much coffee, and then, to counteract, he'd swallowed a couple of sleep potions.
It was not a pleasant feeling.
For a moment he could not breathe. The awareness of other sensations, unfolding little by little in his brain; Something dripping, sticky moisture on his skin, the. awareness of something on his chest, and the smell ...
His nose involuntarily frowned, his stomach made a strange twist...
"Ugh ..." The stench was terrible. Stifling, putrid, and yet ... not entirely unpleasant.
He blinked, his eyelashes stuck with something sticky.
"What ..." He lifted his pupils slowly ... and what he saw ... blood ... everywhere ... entrails, and stone, and red, red impregnating everything ... .the ground were bodies piled one on top of another, and between crumbled rock... pieces of meat ... he recognized a face. Did not know his name, but it was the gaze, now empty, of a man he had seen in the corridors not even a week ago ... and Draco felt ... HUNGER ...
Realization and horror hit him like a train.
His stomach shrank violently, all his muscles screamed, and he had to force himself to roll over to vomit on the rock, and not drown in his own sputum. Bilis and other debris, forced out by disgust and horror, which he could feel tearing through his cerebellum.
Burning his stomach on the way out.
The last remains slid down his chin, and fell to the floor between his arms, joining the pool of vomit. The sudden emptiness of his stomach increased his discomfort, and his appetite was sharpened like a knife. He gasped, and the odor flooded his nostrils.
He closed his eyes with all his might to ward off the temptation.
"No no no." Draco muttered to himself. Repeating the word as an exhortation. He groaned chokedly. Only a monster could feel something like that.
He could not think, he could not react ...
A hand rested shakily on his, and the feeling, suddenly so real, was like an anaphylactic shock.
For Harry it was a reflex, a desperate, almost unconscious, effort to survive, which made him try to get Malfoy's attention.
Draco caught air suddenly aware of the other. Grateful to have something to hold onto, out of his skull. Suddenly able to breathe again.
His pupils turned cautiously toward the owner of the trembling fingers.
"Raksa?"
Raksa's body, usually black and gleaming like the shell of a beetle, or the sparkling, polished facets of an obsidian, was only a step away from him, collapsed on its side ... its shine shattered ... its back ...
Open, broken in pieces, as if something had crushed the chitin and the meat underneath with the sadism of a madman. A festering wound of clotted blood, yellow and green liquids, dripping on the stony floor. Forming an ever larger pool.
Draco did not need to be told, what they were those green and yellow substances. Because the arachnid part, more and more awake of itself, already knew.
They were the fluids inside the black widow. Liquids that were much deeper inside the flesh under his skin, than the usual red blood. The drinks that ran through his most delicate organs, those under his thickest armor, and that were his real vital sage.
The realization left him paralyzed.
It was like hawthorn-shaped ice, sticking to his ankles to rise through his legs, until it reached the inside of his chest. A protective desire, which he barely recognized as his own, rising in the scratched hollow behind his ribs, like a strange demon.
He closed the half-meter that separated them, without even remembering how.
"Raksa" the hissing in which the name came out in, had little of human. But Draco did not notice. And in fact, even if he had, it wouldn't have meant anything in his condition. "What has happened?"
Neither of them was aware of the way the gray irises had expanded in their basins, until they almost swallowed the white of the eyeball.
Harry gasped, drowning in blood, all that came from his lips. The pain was all his world now ... He couldn't stop shivering. Why couldn't he stop shivering?
Draco narrowed his eyes, remembering what had happened. The spy, the tremors, the attack...
'He's protected me.' It was not a question. Inside the moth-eaten box of his brain, the moment Raksa closed around him like a huge black cage, shielding him from everything, had lit up like a fluorescent in the dark.
Draco stretched out his, increasingly white, fingers to pose them with immense delicacy on the shredded edge of Raksa's shoulder.
Harry moaned. For a moment his vision blackened to nothing. Too much contact for his already battered body. Draco removed his fingers instantly.
"Raksa ..." he hissed quietly. The black widow was dying. He saw it in the gray hue of his dark skin, and in the shadows under his eyelids. If he could no longer look into his eyes. Into those immense green eyes, like poison vapor.
If he was expelled from the shelter of Raksa's arms, he loosed the terrible witchcraft of his lips. If he was cast by death, out of the strange magic of their encounter... and lost that still growing between them...
If all that happened, he would never feel whole again.
He sighed wetly, savoring his own unshed tears. Draco didn't know where those ideas came from. Why they sounded so true and terrible. All the horrible things the black widow had done to him seemed so far away now. As memories of another person. In his wake remained the solid impression of his embrace, the languid warmth of his poison in his veins, the strength of his possessiveness ... all the times he had saved his life ... everything he had given for him.
"Raksa ... Raksa ..." he called. Harry looked up at the sound of his voice, too feverish, to understand that he was speaking to him in a language, no longer human. "How can I heal you? The spells I know will not work in you."
Draco's words took a moment to make sense. And when they did, Harry felt like a rat trapped against a wall. Because in this shape, Malfoy was right, no spell would work. In order for magic to touch him, he would have to give up completely the protecting of his arachnid, adopting his human form... reviving Harry Potter.
The thought made him shiver even harder.
Allowing someone to know that he was alive, to open the door of that past again, would be to have to face things that he had believed buried. To be entangled, again, in the web of a war that did not matter to him. In which one side wanted him docile and obedient like a mannequin, and the other wanted him dead.
The very idea made him gag.
"RAKSA!" He felt a warm palm on his cheek. The seizures robbed him of his few remaining forces. He felt fine like butter smeared on too much bread. The reality was escaping him. "Keep breathing!"
Harry gasped.
It was hard to think.
Above him, Malfoy filled all his vision; A huge pale patch, like an immense moon. His mind was spinning, his brain felt like soda inside a can, effervescent and furious to find a way out. His heartbeat was a vinyl inside a crazy record player, humming again and again the same melody; Tu-tum, tu-tum.
'I'm delirious.' He thought almost amused. But the fear in his viscera was very real. 'Why am I so afraid?' It was hard to concentrate enough, to catch thoughts, that a second ago, were so clear.
'Fear ... Harry ... Potter.' He took the idea and turned it, this way, and that way, trying to understand it, until it became discernible. 'So that was it, that's why I was afraid. I don't want to be Harry again.' No, he did not want to. Why he did not? Malfoy was shouting something, he could not understand.
"RAKSA, TELL ME HOW CAN I HELP!"
A, he remembered. If he did not change into his human form, he would die. But he did not want to change. He closed his eyes, for to see Malfoy so fuzzy was beginning to make him dizzy. Something, another part of himself, was also shouting at him. He frowned.
'What? What is it?' The other Harry pushed and shouted, and other images bloomed in his mind: A forest, spiders, a giant tree, wolves, vampires, centaurs, unicorns, elves ... 'The forest.' If he did not survive, who would protect the forest?
He swallowed. He didn't want to be Harry again, but he wanted even less to let so many beings who had trusted in him, and accepted him when no one else had, die.
For a moment, Raksa was so still, that during a nebulous second of growing horror, Draco thought he had died.
"Rak ... sa? …" he muttered. The words slipped between his violently red lips. Snow-white fingers, settling on a black cheek. "RAKSA?"
Suddenly, a convulsion shook Raksa's body, twisting it like a worm about to die.
"RAKSA!" Draco hissed, frightened, holding him by the shoulders. A gasp drowned in agony, leapt torturously, between lips covered with venom and blood, and the change began slowly and horrifyingly.
The process always so fluid, this time was like seeing a crust open, to let out the pus. The body convulsed and twisted, and Draco feared more than once that each agonizing gasps would be the last.
The bones gave off a horribly unpleasant crunch, the muscles and cartilage re-shaped, little by little. The body decreased in height by a few inches, and the chitin opened like thousands of insect shells, which were slowly and tortuously collected inside the skin until they disappeared completely. The black tint of the epidermis washed out, until it became a pale but human tone. The spider fangs twisted and creaked, dwarfed and grew a white crust, to become human teeth. The claws turned into nails. The limbs shrank a little, to the perfect proportions of a human. The eye sockets crunched and replaced, and the nose came up like a fungus on the face, until it formed completely.
Hair was the only thing that did not change. Long to the shoulders, black and deranged in tips and bangs, looking more bitten than cut.
In the end, what remained on the floor was a tall, athletic and dark man. Soaked in blood and fluids, whose back looked like the work of a deranged butcher. Broken bones, and parts of the spine, poking through flesh.
Draco had never looked for a wand so fast, nor with such terror.
"Come on, come on, come on …"
Despite losing his wand days ago, when he fled from Malfoy Manor, he soon found another among the corpses surrounding them.
He began reciting how many healing spells he knew.
To be continue