I watched him walk away, my body cooling from his warm embrace. I needed a moment for my eyes to feel less wet and my heart to feel less fragile. I'd felt it before, but now, as a battle was about to erupt around us, I truly wondered if I really would see Harry again. Alive.
I knew that I couldn't stay here very long. I belonged out there, fortifying and fighting. I would be as safe as possible, but I would make Harry proud tonight. I took one more breath of cool fresh air, and left the clock tower.
I rejoined my group of people in the third floor corridor, where they were gathered around a window, staring at the ground below.
"What's going on, Adam?" I asked, placing my hand on his shoulder.
He turned around, and looked a little startled to see me. "I thought you were going to make potions," he said, quietly.
"Change of plans."
He moved aside so I could see exactly what they were all so fixated on. Down below, on the bridge into the castle, stood a large crowd of people. Death Eaters. Here to fight.
My stomach sank and the reality of this night kicked in. This battle was what the last nine months of my life had been leading up to, and I was about to come wand to wand with the most evil witches and wizards.
We watched as they dismantled all the protective charms of the entrance in just minutes, and started to storm the castle.
"Wouldn't we be more useful down there, fighting them off the entrance?" Hannah Abbott asked.
"No," one of the Weasley twins answered. "There's people down there for a reason. Plus, now the wards are down, no entrance is safe."
So we waited. It wasn't long until we could hear the commotion from downstairs. Shouted curses, screams of pain, clanking from the suits of armor that had come alive in our defense. It was eerily quiet in our hallway, but it was coming.
Death Eaters made it up the stairs, and we began to fight them off.
"Expeliarmus!"
"Locomotor Mortis!"
"Impedimenta!"
It was a flurry of spells around me, as I began to fight with someone I did not recognize. She was short and round, but quick with her wand. She rapid-fired as many damaging spells at me as possible, most of which I managed to evade. A stinging hex grazed the back of my neck, which brought tears to my eyes. I furiously tried to blink them away knowing that any weakness on my end would allow her to overtake me.
"STUPIFY!" I yelled, and watched her topple over to the floor. I took a deep breath, wiped away the tears clinging to my eyes, and went to find someone else to disarm.
As soon as I turned around, the air around us exploded. I was thrown backwards, hitting a wall hard. I dropped the ground on my hands and knees, unable to see a thing. The absolute pain I was in forced me to the ground, to close my eyes for a moment. Was there even a castle below me anymore? Was the battle over? The world had surely ended.
Except a minute later, I heard the groans and screams of those around me. I blinked quickly, and found the air very dusty and harsh against my eyes. . My ears rang from the loud burst, and I couldn't bring myself to imagine what had just happened. Nothing good.
I blinked again, as the dust started to clear I could make out shapes and the sound of someone's wailing. Against my body's protests, I got up and headed towards the group of people gathering. A column had fallen, and I saw Fred Weasley, pinned under it. His eyes were glassy and frozen.
He was gone. My stomach turned- our first loss.
My eyes moved upward, to the body next to him. Adam lay there, moaning in pain. His legs were crushed by the falling column, and I rushed to him.
"I'm here," I said, through the tears in my eyes. Adam couldn't die. He couldn't. I wouldn't let him.
His eyes tried to focus on my face, but then he turned his head to the side and threw up. I rubbed his hair, and tried to say soothing things. "Just hang on, Adam. You're okay. You'll be okay. Just hang on. I'll get you some pain potion and you'll feel much better."
"Kat," he managed. "This is it for me."
"Don't you say that, you git," I scolded him.
"Please leave me and go on," he said, his voice quiet and hoarse. I could hear the fighting resuming behind me and paid it no attention. "Please."
"Kat, you need to get up," a familiar voice urged me. I turned around to see Harry, pulling at my arms. "Another round of Death Eaters is coming."
"I can't leave him here," I cried, gazing down at Adam's face.
"You can't do anything for him right now," he said. "You're being stupid. Let's GO!"
"He's right," Adam managed. "Please leave me."
"I can't." I said, tears falling down my face at an alarming pace. "I need to get him to safety."
Harry used his wand to lift the piece of the column that was crushing Adam. This movement brought on a new wave of painful noises from him, but I picked him up under one of his arms and Harry grabbed the other side. I followed Harry to a tapestry down the hallway.
"You have to leave him here, Kat. You can come back for him later," Harry said, lifting the tapestry so I could put Adam behind it.
Adam's eyes were unfocused and darting around, while pained, throaty noises filled the air. I leaned down, put a silencing charm on him, and squeezed his hand, before replacing the tapestry and moving on.
"You can't afford to be stupid out there, Kat," Harry said, lecturing me as we rejoined the group. "People are going to die tonight. People that you care about. So if you want to not get killed- and you gave someone ample time to kill you kneeling over Adam like that, you best be aware of your surroundings."
I knew he was right, so I couldn't say anything at all. I had been stupid and it couldn't happen again. I struggled to keep up with Harry's quick pace as he strode down the corridor, towards an invasion of disgustingly huge spiders. The spiders were the size of a Muggle car, and they had taken advantage of the hole the explosion had blown through the wall to start invading.
"Stupify!" "STUPIFY!" "Stupify!"
Three of us shot spells at them in rapid fire, and they toppled backwards out the window from which they came. At that point, Harry grabbed both Hermione and me and pushed us forward, Ron at his heels. The Death Eaters had returned. The Weasleys scrambled to conceal Fred, so they may come back for his body later. For now, we had to regroup, and soldier on.
Harry pushed us into an alcove, and pulled a tapestry over the entrance.
"You NEED to calm down, Ron," Hermione said, using her hands to push his shoulders against the wall. He was shaking- from grief, from anger. In that moment, I was happy that Harry's earlier comments had pushed me into numbness. For now.
"I want to fight! I want to go out there and fight the Death Eaters! I need to!" he spit, resisting her.
"We are the only ones that can end this," Harry said. "Let's not lose sight of what we are here to do."
Ron stopped fighting against Hermione, and took a deep breath. "All right. What's the plan?"
"You have to get to the snake. To kill it," I spoke, for the first time. In some ways, I felt like I shouldn't have been here. We had gone our separate ways when they had gone on to Gringott's without me. But we were fighting for the same cause. They were my friends. My best friends, and we were still in this together.
"Yes," Hermione said. "And Voldemort will have the snake- he won't be letting it out of his sight, that's for certain. He wants you to go to the snake, so that he will have you. Get in his head, Harry, and find out where he is."
I looked at Harry's face, as his eyes shut and instantly looked as though he was miles away. I watched his face twitch, almost as if he was dreaming, though it looked like a peaceless dream. I wondered what he saw. It was silent, so silent, in the space we occupied, as all of our eyes were fixated on Harry. Far away, we could hear the screams, triumphs, and losses of battle.
A minute went by. Two. Three.
Finally, after what felt like hours, his eyes opened again.
"Voldemort is in the Shrieking Shack," he said. "He thinks I will come to him."
"He's not even FIGHTING?" Hermione asked, anger built in her voice.
"He doesn't think I need to," he explained.
"So obviously," Ron began, "You can't go to him. That's what he expects, that's what he wants. So how about I go and-"
"No," we all said at once.
The tapestry surrounding us was ripped away to reveal two masked Death Eaters standing there.
"Why hello, Potter-"
"Glisseo!" I shouted, first to my wand for once. The stairs below their feet gave way to a slippery ramp, and I watched as the slid on the their stomachs down it. I felt pleased with myself as the anger on their faces grew.
However, the spell grew and I found the ground beneath our feet becoming slippery and we began to fall as well. Hermione shot spell after spell at the Death Eaters around us, as they continued to miss us.
"Get under the cloak!" I shouted at Harry, as we found ourselves barreling toward the center of the fighting. "Don't worry about us, you need to get. under. the. cloak."
Harry pulled it out, and tried to throw it over the four of us. At the last second, I got pulled away, and found myself face to face with Fenrir Greyback.
"I wasn't done with you," he growled into my face. For a second I was frozen. I was in shock that I had gotten seperated from Harry, Ron, and Hermione and didn't think I'd be able to find my way back to them. I was also terrified of the man standing in front of me.
Before I could put too much thought into it, instinct took over and I grabbed for my wand. "Stupify!" I yelled, and he flew out the glass window behind him.
"Ah!" I said, to no one in particular. I was proud of my work.
I looked down the staircase in front of me, towards the chaos. Did I see anything that gave them away, under the cloak? Ron's foot, an arm? Something caught on top of them, in the flying rubble?
I could see nothing. They were gone.
Author's Note: My 2015 resolution is to finish this story. Hopefully, I still have some faithful readers out there (please stop by in the reviews, I'd love to catch up and thank you for your support!). Thank you to anyone who has messaged me during my hiatus and asked for updates- it means the world. Thanks, all.