Parvati understood that Apparating meant disappearing and reappearing almost instantly in another place, and that the journey couldn't take more than a fraction of a second, but by the time she felt a kitchen chair being shoved under her tired body, she felt like she had traveled to the ends of the sky and back again.  She felt Hermione take her hand away from her mouth, and in the suddenly-bright light of the kitchen she blinked several times, trying to get her wits back about her.  She could see Mum, looking so very pale under the smooth olive tan of her skin, and red-headed, lanky Ron Weasley, who was Hermione's boyfriend, and – a girl with long glossy black hair and oval brown eyes.  "Pandita?"

"Someone get her some cocoa.  She's out of it," Parvati heard Hermione say, and the black-haired girl leaned closer to her.  "Parvati, it's me, Padma.  Are you okay?"

Padma.  Her twin sister … Parvati blinked again, and suddenly the memory of everything that had happened in the desolate forest with its cold wind and copper smells slapped her hard across the face.  "Padma!  Bloody hell, what's going on?  I – Pandita was gone – and I followed – she's – she was – I found her, I found her, I found her …"  She didn't realize she was crying until a warm cinnamon-smelling cloth was pressed against her cheeks and nose and eyes, and she sputtered and garbled into the handkerchief.  "She's out there, they're going to – they're – "

"I know."  Parvati felt the pressure of a hand that was the exact same size and shape and colour as hers, and then a mug of warm brown liquid was being shoved against her lips.  "Parvati, drink this, you'll feel better.  Now, do you hear me, I know.  I know about Pandita."

"And you're just standing there?!"  Parvati smacked wildly against Padma's hand and the mug of cocoa, and Ron levitated the cup before it could go spilling and smashing all over the floor.  "Well, don't just do something, stand there!  We have to go get her!"

"Bloody hell."  Parvati felt herself being shoved back in the chair, and in a moment Padma was sitting on her legs so she couldn't leap across the kitchen.  "Parvati, you need to listen to me.  We can't do anything for Pandita.  I'm sorry, but we can't.  Right now there's something more important, do you understand?"  Parvati thought she was speaking very slowly.  She frowned, and the skin on her forehead knit itself together the way it wasn't supposed to, you'd get wrinkles.  "Hermione has discovered a spell that could defeat – er – Voldemort-sorry-Ron," she said in a rush.  "It has to do with blood.  Dumbledore and the members of the Order need someone to test it on.  Do you understand?  Nod your head."  Parvati shook her head.  "They need someone to test it, two people who share the same blood."

"The same blood," Parvati repeated slowly.  "The same …"  She swallowed hard, and suddenly the kitchen was so bright, and her head hurt so much, her head and her back and her hands where she had never really managed to heal them, and she hurt with the knowledge of what Padma was saying.  "Twins," she said finally, beginning to understand.

"Yes, twins," Padma replied, sounding very relieved that finally her twin sister had proven they had roughly the same amount of brains.  "We're all Apparating to Hogwarts now.  One of us will take you, since you don't have your Apparating license yet."  Parvati wondered, briefly, how her sister could still think of things like the Ministry of Magic and Apparition licenses.  "We'll explain it when we get there."

"Erm.  Sure."  Parvati fidgeted a little, because Padma was still sitting on her and it was getting uncomfortable.  "Are we going now?"

"Yes."

She never thought to ask what kind of testing this was going to be, until she remembered what Padma had said about two people who shared the same blood.  When they got to Hogwarts, she turned toward her twin sister, but Padma had already rushed off to find Dumbledore.  "Hermione?" she said quietly, turning to the other girl and trying to ignore the fact that Ron was holding her quietly, brushing at her hair and the invisible tears on her cheeks, "what's going to happen?"

Hermione refused to look at her, brown eyes sliding off Parvati's deadened gaze.  "One of you," she said finally, speaking more to Ron's chest than Parvati, "has to die."

* * *

When Dumbledore finally arrived, looking old and tired and lined with a great more many wrinkles than Parvati remembered (she also remembered, how she and Lavender used to giggle about making a Wrinkle-Away potion for him, as an anonymous Christmas present, and how they used to giggle, how it was so much easier to giggle years ago), she almost burst into tears at the proud, solemn look in his once-twinkling blue eyes.  She thought of that look, the one she had seen at every Hogwarts Leaving Feast in her first five years of school, but it was usually directed toward Harry Potter or Ron or Hermione, never at her.  She wondered why this had to be the first, and last, time she would ever see it.

"Miss Patil," Dumbledore said softly, and then hastened to correct himself, apparently remembering that there were two Miss Patils standing in front of him, "Parvati.  Thank you for coming on such short notice.  Your sister has made me aware of – er – the difficult things you have endured tonight.  You have my sympathies."

I don't need your bloody sympathies, was on the tip of Parvati's tongue, but she managed – with great force, and by gritting her teeth very loudly – to hold it in.  Instead she said, "Thank you, sir."

"You realize," Dumbledore continued, "that the sacrifice we are asking of you is not an easy one, Parvati.  Many of your friends and fellow students and even your sister have been contributing to this war, but never in a way quite as explicit as this one."  He hesitated, and his eyes too slipped away from Parvati's, if only momentarily.  "Each one knows that he might die.  None are asked to die."

"I understand."

"And we would understand, of course, if you were not prepared to give up your life."

This time it was Parvati's turn to look away, to cast a long and blurry gaze onto the stone floor, as if it might give her an answer.  Dumbledore was offering her the chance to be selfish and keep her life – for what?  To sit at home and Banish bottle after bottle of Triple-Strength Butterbeer to her mother to her let drown her sorrows?  To sit at home and wait for her father to return from Merlin knows where? – letting her know that none of them would blame her.  Perhaps it was everyone's biggest instinct, to live.

She thought of her mother, who would sit at home and read without really seeing the words, waiting for her father, who might never come home.  She thought of her twin sister, who would hold her chin high and walk back out onto the copper battlefields to fight and kill and perhaps save some lives too, and maybe years later would think about the two sisters whom she had to sacrifice in this war.

She thought of her baby sister, the little girl who was forced to grow up much too soon in the last minutes of her life, and the sacrifice that Pandita Patil had made – for her, and for Padma, and for the Order, even if she was never asked to die.

And Pandita's oldest sister looked straight into blue eyes that seemed, perhaps, a little deader than her own and said, "I am."

* * *

It took almost a week to complete the combination potion and spell.  Part of the problem, Hermione explain tensely, while she stirred the cauldron and waited for it to explode four times and then simmer down, was now that Snape was dead – at that, she had to take a deep breath, and then she never continued, her eyes shadowed.

Parvati simply nodded, standing next to Hermione and watching her brew her death.

"Do I have to drink it?" she asked curiously one day, watching Hermione make the third batch (the first two had failed miserably, turning a rather sickly bile colour when they were supposed to be black) more out of honest inquisitiveness than any morbid fascination.  "How do you expect You-Know-Who to die from it if he has to drink it?"

"You don't have to drink it," Hermione replied.  "Your, um, sister does.  Then we saw the spell and it affects everyone who shares the same blood as Padma."

"So that means Harry has to drink it."

"If it works."  Hermione glanced at the hourglass next to the cauldron and began stirring again.

"And there's an antidote?"

"Yes."

"For the person who drinks it."

"Yes."

"I guess you wouldn't want an antidote for You-Know-Who anyway."

"Hmm," was all Hermione said, either missing the attempt at humour or choosing to ignore it entirely.  "Will you stir that while you count to three-hundred-twenty-two?"

After that, Parvati decided not to say much, except that "it's frothing now" and "I think it sounds angry enough, don't you?"  Hermione didn't seem to mind; in fact, she seemed to welcome Parvati's silence, the way she usually had during those five years that they roomed together ("Honestly, you pathetic, brainless, Trelawney-drooling idiots, can't you take your bloody Trelawney drooling to some other room, like, say, the bathroom, so I can get some real bloody work done here?").

But afterward, when Hermione and Dumbledore and McGonagall had gotten the potion to turn an angry blue, then fade to a slick black like tar; when they had figured out the right way to pronounce "Patie tumor cerebelli"; when Padma had swallowed the last drop of a goblet full of the thick black liquid; when they had cast the spell, in shaking voices and with shaking wands held between shaking fingers; when Parvati finally began to feel the cancer spreading through the synapses of her brain, their gift to her and her gift to them – she sat down, and stayed with Parvati, and talked.

* * *

"Were you close to your sister?"

"Very.  We were always close."

"Why you and not Padma?"

"Why me and not Padma what?" Parvati replied slowly.  She was finding that the bigger the tumor wrapping around her cerebellum, the longer it took her to do most things.  Mostly it had to do with motor control.  She wasn't very good at blinking, or waving, or looking down at her watch anymore.  But she could usually still talk, unless something wasn't clear to her.  "Why I was close to Pandita and Padma wasn't, you mean?"

"Yes."

Parvati thought about that for a while, with what part of her brain was still hers.  "I'm not sure.  I guess because – well, Padma was always reading or something.  It's not much fun to tag around after your big sister when she's sitting on her bed reading a book.  So Pandita always followed me and my friends around."

"What did she do with you?"

"Everything.  Swimming, sledding, just playing.  We gave her makeovers and did her hair.  We put nail varnish on her when she was three and Mum and I had a terrific row about you."

"It sounds like fun."

Parvati tried to listen to the nuances of Hermione's voice, but she felt like she was also losing her ability to understand people's emotions when she couldn't see and talk to them at the same time.  "It was."

"I wish I'd had a brother or a sister or something," Hermione admitted softly, sounding contemplative.  Or maybe Parvati was just making that up in her head.  Maybe Hermione really sounded airy and disgusted, because Parvati couldn't tell the difference.  "When I die, my parents are going to be all alone, you know."

"Children usually outlive their parents," Parvati parroted some book that Padma had probably read over the years, and then realized how absolutely raving mad that was.

"I meant, when I die in the war."

Parvati didn't have an answer for that, and trying to think of one was going to require enormous amounts of work that she didn't have the energy or the brainpower for.  "Dumbledore is very proud of you," she settled for at last.

If that was a weird answer, Hermione didn't show it.  "Oh, I know.  I was ever so proud when I got my letter, so long ago, and I'm still proud.  I wouldn't have – "  That sounded suspiciously like a sob – "I would rather die now than never have come to Hogwarts in the first place.  It's just – dying.  The dying, it's sad."  She paused for a moment, so long that Parvati could hear her breathing match time with Hermione's.  "Parvati, why did you choose to do this?"

"Do?"

"To – this.  To do this test."

Parvati tried to think about that, too, but it seemed impossible.  "Because I let my little sister die," she mumbled sleepily, letting her cheek rest on the side of her arm.  "She's dead."

"That's not why."

Despite her absolute exhaustion, her desire to go to sleep until she was sleeping and her body was sleeping and her brain could sleep too, Parvati felt the familiar snap of annoyance that she usually felt around Hermione.  "Oh, yeah?  Then why?"

"You know why."

It was the last thing she remembered Hermione saying.  She must have gone to sleep, because when she woke up the room was empty and the only thing left to record Hermione's presence was a scrap of parchment with her bold, firm-quilled handwriting lying on the dungeon floor next to Parvati's bed.

Parvati stretched a bit, but couldn't quite reach it.  Her hands were still ragged with blood and dirt from last Saturday, and her fingers were starting to curl, stiffly, from disuse.  Finally she let herself fall from the small bed onto the floor, trying not to care that the sudden motion jarred every nerve from her toes to her nose, certainly not caring that the tumble left another layer of dust on the once-pink, once-dress robe that she was still wearing.

The note was short, and to the point, much the way all of Parvati's conversations with Hermione had been over the last six years.

Friday morning

Parvati,

I have to go – urgent Order business – McGonagall is around, and will be down to see if you need anything over … the last next few days.  Your sister will be fine.  The antidote seems to have worked.

Thank you.

She finished the note, read it three more times just to make sure she hadn't missed anything (which she often did, in fact sometimes she thought she missed important parts of her dreams, and she seemed to be dreaming more and more – was that an effect of the tumor, too?), and then discarded the note on the floor, next to her nose.  The scent of parchment and ink was very familiar and almost warm in its dryness, nothing like the smell of mold on the dungeon walls or, so far away, a breath of copper in a field where a child lay dying.

Parvati wondered if it was still Friday.  It took her a quarter of an hour, she guessed, but she managed to train her body to turn her wrist over so that she could see the planets clicking around and around the face of the watch Dean had given her to mark their one-year anniversary.  Yes, it was still Friday evening.  Nearly Saturday.  For a moment the memory of Saturdays and sunshine, treats and kittens and sisters, overwhelmed her, and then she remembered her last Saturday with Pandita and knew she would choose to remember the sunny ones first.

She thought she dreamed sometimes, as she died that day, thought she heard voices and saw shapes and smelled things that she had never smelt on earth.  For a moment she swore she felt the weight of a tiny little girl, ten-going-on-eleven-going-on-too-old, in her arms, until she realized that she was hugging only the flatness of cold stone beneath her body.  Other times she caught a whiff of coppery odor and felt the bile threaten to rise through her body, tried not to think about that little girl being spilled with copper from her nose to her thighs.

Sometimes she thought she saw a light, the way wizards always talked about death – a sudden flash of light, like a final goodbye curse – but it never was, sometimes it was her wand, sending out a few last sparks as she took her last breaths, and once it was McGonagall, descending into the dungeons that had always been Snape's domain, coming down to check on her, to feel for a pulse the way Lavender was picking her way across a battlefield right now.  And she cried against cold stone, and wondered if one death justified another, and Parvati died.

finis

A/N:  I am very well aware that I rushed the end of this, and I'm not proud of it. A very big part of me wanted to get it posted before Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out, which was in less than a day by the time I got this posted, and most people probably did not read it before they read OotP, but it was the goal that counted in my head. So it's not as polished as Legacy, and also the style is very different. But I enjoyed the challenge with Parvati. In fact, she probably ended up being more of a Mary Sue than Pandita.  At least I think.