Title:
Decimation
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters:
Hermione, Voldemort
Prompt: 016: Purple
Word Count:
563 words
Rating: R
Summary: Voldemort surveys
the field of battle.
Author's Notes: Based on the
symbolism of the color. For Divadeanna's
birthday. Happy one, love! Not the fic, you. :)
---
They draped over each other like rotten fruit thrown from the basket, moldering in their own boiling blood, gaping wounds turning them into something no longer human. He saw vomit mingle with pus and black blood, saw the way the pure white of the Death Eater masks stained a deep brown next to limp hands.
Voldemort surveyed the street on which the battle began. Of course, now the concrete had been fulled from its foundations, and the houses were leveled, still burning and perfuming the air with the smell of smoldering hair and clothing and flesh. His bare feet pressed against glass and stone and dirt and grass, heedless of the wounds on their soles. The fabric of his robes swung around his legs and brushed like a tendril of smoke against the dead bodies. They were stained at the hem.
Dust grayed his face, but his eyes glowed red in spite of the sunlight that should have dimmed their intensity. His fingers caressed the length of his wand as he walked through the carnage, unharmed and alive with his enemy hanged on a tree like on a cross, hands bound to branches and head hanging down.
He searched for signs of movement, but other than the crackling and cracking of wood as they fell to the ground, no one stirred, not even his Death Eaters. He felt no remorse for their deaths, but he felt concern at having lost a significant number of his followers. This did not matter so much, though, for after this battle, there would be more followers.
He came to a house whose first story still seemed stable, although the second floor had caved in. Stepped over bodies, he made his way to the building and pushed open the door. Aside from the debris of the crash, there was little damage to the parlor room, and Voldemort's eyes darted from one body to another, these dead from the Killing Curse rather than from any far slower and more painful curse. There was a rustle and plaster rained down from above him. Voldemort shielded his eyes and looked up to see a girl bound to the ceiling, her wand pointing at one of the bodies and her eyes open and blinking. Her mouth had been gagged, which meant that she had cast the Killing Curse without speaking. Her nose was a swollen bulb - broken - and blood steadily dripped to a spot on the floor already the diameter of a dinner plate.
Voldemort summoned her wand to him before releasing her from the bindings. She fell to the floor, bracing herself with her hands. Her face contorted as she landed wrong, and he heard several sharp cracks. In the midst of her pain, he took in her clothing - Hogwarts standard, Gryffindor crest, Head Girl. He knew who she was within the second, and he raised his wand to kill her, but stopped as she forced herself into a crouching position, bracing herself against the spasms in her stomach. Survival - what she had in common with him. No one else had survived this battle, and although Voldemort possessed little concept of honor between enemies, he felt it best to keep her alive. But take her alive.
Stupefy.
As he continued his walk through the rubble, the toes of her shoes slid over the path his robes made.
