Sorry for the break in chapters, life and work has been a bit crazy and I haven't been able to write as much as I'd like.

We are beginning to near the end now, so I hope you all enjoy the ride!

Song Inspiration: Last to Know - Three Days Grace

Chapter 31

Draco watched, crammed between Potter and Weasley on one side and Hermione on the other, as they all hid behind the large crate that blocked the entrance into the Shrieking Shack. The four of them watched through the gaps around the item that blocked them from view of the occupants within the room.

"Where is Severus?" the Dark Lord snapped.

Draco saw as his father cowered in the face of his master's ire, drawing back from the man and seeming to shrink in on himself in an effort to make himself as small a target as possible.

"I've informed him that you await his arrival, My Lord. He is on his way to you now."

With a dismissive wave of his hand, the Dark Lord turned away from the once-haughty man that now cringed away from him like an animal kicked one too many times.

"Ah, Severus," the man uttered softly, and Draco heard the tell-tale swish of heavy robes before his godfather appeared in his line of sight.

Draco and the trio that surrounded him watched with bated breath as the Dark Lord strode purposefully over to his loyal spy, walking in a circle around Snape.

"You are dismissed, Lucius," he said to Draco's father, not even sparing the man a glance, and they watched as Lucius all but flew from the building.

"How can I be of service to you, My Lord?" Snape asked obsequiously, not looking his master directly in the eye: to do so was an offense immediately punishable by the Cruciatus, if the Dark Lord was feeling charitable, and every Death Eater knew that unspoken rule better than they knew their own names.

"I require your…advice, Severus," the Dark Lord stated in his whispering voice, and at the bow of Snape's head he continued. "You see, I was certain that with this wand," he twirled the plain looking rod absently through long, bony fingers, "I would be able to quash this little…rebellion…effortlessly. That was what you assured me, after all. But you lied."

"No, My Lord," Snape said, voice calm and controlled, "you have achieved unparalleled things already in the short time the wand has been in your possession."

"No, Severus," he retorted, and the angry bite in his voice was clear to hear. "You see, I myself am 'unparalleled', to use your word. But the magic I have accomplished with the Elder Wand has been no more extraordinary than the magic I performed with my old Yew and Phoenix feather wand."

Draco had to muffle behind his hands the gasp that struggled to break free at the Dark Lord's words. The megalomaniac had the Elder Wand?

'We are all fucked,' he thought to himself, resigned to the inevitable. There was no way they could possibly win against the man who possessed the Death Stick…was there?

"I'm afraid I do not understand, My Lord," Snape replied, apologetic. "You took the wand from the tomb of Dumbledore himself. The wand surely answers to you now."

"Perhaps," the Dark Lord said emotionlessly. "Or perhaps, the wand withholds its greatest powers from me because it knows that I am not it's true master. Am I, Severus?"

Draco felt the blood drain from his face at the Dark Lord's unspoken meaning. Snape had not killed the wand's previous owner… No. That had been…

He watched in horror as the Dark Lord brought the wand down through the air in a sudden and violent slash and felt his head swim at the sight of the blood that immediately began to gush from his godfather's exposed neck. Hermione's hand gripped his own tightly and he realized at that moment that he had already begun moving to assist the man who had been there for him his entire life. She held him back, with assistance from Potter and Weasley both, as the sullen wizard collapsed to the ground in a rapidly expanding pool of blood.

The Dark Lord looked down dispassionately at the man who had served him so well for so many years, watching as what little color Severus Snape had once possessed leached from his skin along with his life force.

"Now the wand will answer to me, Severus," he said, not a trace of emotion in his voice, before turning and striding from the room.

Once the door banged closed behind him, Draco was moving, not caring whether or not the other three followed him. A quick wave of his wand shoved the large crate far to the side of the hole and he was racing across the room. Skidding in the blood that covered the floor, he dropped to his knees and immediately clasped his hands tightly over the gaping hole that stretched across the expanse of Snape's throat.

He felt the air stir around him and watched Hermione drop to the ground at his side, her wand already arcing gracefully through the air as she worked to reverse the damage that the Dark Lord's severing spell had inflicted.

As his witch worked frantically to heal his godfather, to save his very life, the older wizard's black eyes met Potter's green ones over Draco's shoulder.

"Take them," the man whispered gutturally, motioning weakly to the silvery strands that seemed to ooze from his very pores: memories.

"Take them...to the Pensive in...my office," he said in a sentence fragmented by his gasps as he attempted to breath around the greivous wound in his neck, and Draco watched as Potter moved to the man's other side before dropping to his knees.

With a brisk wave of his wand, Draco conjured a vial for the messy-haired Chosen One and put it into his outstretched hand. Potter held the vial in one hand and his wand – Draco's wand – in the other and used the Hawthorn wand to lead the silvery memory strands into the vial, which Draco then stoppered for him with another flick of his wand.

Apparently finished with Potter, Snape looked away from him and back to his other side, where Hermione kneeled beside him, frantically working to heal him, and Draco kneeled directly behind her. His eyes roved over the two of them, considering, before he focused all his attention on Hermione.

"You remind me...so much of someone I...once knew…someone I loved more than my own life." Hermione's confident movements faltered at the man's unexpected words, and she briefly stopped her ministrations to look directly into his black eyes for the first time since entering the shack.

"And you," he added, turning those dark eyes next to Draco. "Don't ever be...foolish enough to let your hubris ruin what...you have with Miss Granger. I was stupid enough...in my youth to believe that I could have...it all. Believe me when I say...you cannot. If you must choose between your family...and her in the end, just know that...a life lived without love is more...damning than any mark you could...bear."

Draco panicked when Snape's grasp on the hem of his robes suddenly went slack. He lunged forward, frantically trying to bring his godfather back, when Hermione stopped him with a hand over his own.

"It's okay, Draco," she said softly. "He's stable, just unconscious from blood loss. If we can get him to the castle and get some Blood-Replenishing Potions into his system, he should make it."

Draco sagged in relief, burying his face in the back of her neck. Her hair, braided back after their journey into the Chamber of Secrets, was still contained, and he was able to press his lips to the sensitive skin at her nape in gratitude.

"C'mon," Potter said, rising to his feet and motioning Weasley forward. "Let's get him into the castle."

With a wave of Hermione's wand, Snape's body smoothly lifted from the floor and the other three helped her guide the man's inert body through the long and winding tunnel that ran from the Shrieking Shack to the base of the Whomping Willow. Before they had made it even halfway, however, a familiar piercing ringing filled their ears once again.

They lowered Snape to the ground as cautiously and quickly as they could manage, to not cause him further injury, then huddled around one another. Hermione gripped Draco's hand tightly in hers as a voice whispered in their ears.

"You have all fought bravely for a cause that you believe is just. I appreciate your loyalty to one another, but it is misplaced. You see, you follow a mere boy that would allow you all to die for him, only to ensure that he will not have to face me. I am a merciful lord, however, and I will give you all a chance to see the…error in your ways. I will give you one hour to tend to your injured – to mourn your dead. At the end of that hour, Harry Potter, if you have not come to me in the Forbidden Forest, I will join this battle myself. I will kill every single witch and wizard who has fought to protect you from me. Know that every death that follows will be laid directly at your feet. And I will still find you, you will still fall, and the loss of so much talent – so much magical blood – will forever be attributed to you. One hour, Harry Potter…one hour."

Draco turned his head to look at Potter, seeing Hermione and Weasley do the same. The dark-haired wizard was pale, and even in the dimness of the Lumos that shone from the end of Weasley's wand they could see his hands trembling.

"Let's keep going," Potter said, nearly hiding the quiver in his voice… nearly. "We've got to get Snape some help: he doesn't have much time left."

When Hermione made to say something to her best friend, Draco merely reached out a hand and placed it on her forearm, staying her words. If it were him, he knew he would want some time and silence to filter through what the Dark Lord had said to him, to separate out feelings from facts.

Fact number one. If Potter went into the Forbidden Forest, he would die. There would be no way to kill the Dark Lord, and they would all lose – everything.

Fact number two. There wasn't a single death or injury in this castle that could be laid at Potter's feet. Every person here had chosen to fight, not for the Chosen One, but for something greater and more important than themselves.

However, Draco knew that it would be hard for Potter to convince himself of that second truth, even if he knew the validity of the first. He only hoped that the poster child of Gryffindor House would, for once in his life, not let his bleeding-heart lead him down a path riddled with stupidity.

When the four of them finally walked into the Great Hall, Snape's body hovering between their bodies, the sight that greeted them all made Draco feel sick to his stomach. All of the House tables had been vanished and long benches had been set against the walls, around the perimeter of the entire massive room. People sat all along the benches in various states of injury.

He watched as the ones that were relatively unscathed walked through the room, tending to one wounded witch or wizard after another. The ones that sat on the benches around the room were nursing a wide variety of wounds, from vicious cuts and bruises to gaping gashes and spell burns. He looked as Weasley's ex-girlfriend, Brown, pulled a large white bandage away from her side to reveal gashes that spanned from just beneath her armpit all the way down to her hip bone: gashes that looked uncannily like a werewolf's claw marks.

A few spots down the bench, his breath caught as he saw Blaise tending to Pansy. His housemate sported a black and blue bruise that spanned almost the entirety of the left side of her face. He took a small amount of comfort from the fact that she seemed to be aware of what was happened around her as Blaise helped her spread a thick yellow cream across her face and hoped that fact meant that the injury was not as ghastly as it looked.

Worse than seeing all of their schoolmates wounded, however, was the sight that took up the center of the room. A long row of hospital blankets stretched nearly from one end of the room to the other. The people who lay upon them, however, were not injured. There would be no poultices or potions to restore and revive those that lay here…

This was the resting place for the dead of Hogwarts.

All four of their eyes stayed glued to the center of the room, frantically searching – and hoping not to find – familiar faces among the motionless bodies. They brought Snape to McGonagall herself, trusting no one else in the room to not finish what the Dark Lord had left incomplete. After they dropped him off with the Deputy Headmistress and were assured that Snape would be given the potions he needed to recover, they raced to search among the dead.

Draco clenched his teeth as he walked up the aisle. Many of those that lay dead he vaguely recognized, of course, but he went person to person, hoping against hope that there was no one who he knew better than a passing acquaintance. That hope was squashed at the sight of Millicent Bulstrode. The stoutly built girl lay on one of the many grey blankets. In repose, her face looked less…angular than it had in life, but the charred wound in her abdomen removed any naïve notion of her sleeping peacefully. She had been hit by a dark curse, although Draco couldn't be sure of which one exactly. Regardless of which one it was, though, the result was the same: Millicent Bulstrode, Slytherin witch who joined to fight on the side of Light, was dead.

He continued down the line, relieved to see Theo and Daphne from the corner of his eye as they raced around and assisted in healing the wounded. Only one Slytherin casualty, but that did not make the one hurt any less.

A pained moan drew his attention, and he looked up in time to see Hermione's face crumple as tears raced down her cheeks when she looked down at the people that lay on the ground before her. He noticed Lupin immediately, the werewolf and former Defense teacher not being a person that he could easily forget. After all, the man had unquestionably been the best professor they'd had in the class in his entire six years at Hogwarts, even if Draco had never been willing to give the man the honor of saying such a thing aloud.

The man, who had always looked so tired and worn down in life, now lay peacefully in death. He watched as Hermione knelt down and brought the man's arm out at his side, then did the same for the woman that lay to Lupin's right, causing their fingers to brush against one another.

"Who was she?" Draco asked softly as he came up behind Hermione and wrapped his arms around her waist, letting her borrow his strength in the face of her clear grief.

"His wife. Her name was Tonks – Nymphadora Tonks." She turned to look up at him, tears glittering in her honey eyes as she added, "She was your cousin. Andromeda's daughter."

Draco froze in shock, then looked down at the striking woman with her plum-colored hair. Regret and sorrow welled up inside of him at the thought of the woman, his own flesh and blood, that he would never now know.

"They just had a son," Hermione mumbled sadly. "Teddy. Remus made Harry his godfather. He's an orphan now too…"

A wail nearby caused both of their heads to whip up and Draco saw a large grouping of ginger heads a few feet away. He helped Hermione scramble to her feet and she rushed toward the gathering of Weasley's. Draco, reluctant to let her out of arm's reach but not desiring to join a gaggle of Weasleys stayed a few feet back. As the group parted to let Hermione in, she headed straight to the youngest Weasley to comfort the weeping girl. They stood over the body of a man, and when Draco looked closer, he felt his stomach drop at the sight of Bill Weasley laying there, his blonde wife draped across his body as she sobbed inconsolably.

Draco felt an unexpected wave of grief at the realization that the man that had allowed him to shelter in his home, who had let him stay there despite the danger that the action put him in, was now dead at the hands of his former master's goons and thugs. The sight of the man's mother sobbing at his side while his father held her tightly to his side, tears coursing down his own face as well, made Draco immensely uncomfortable.

He looked up to see Potter and Weasley join them, and the agonized moan that left the latter as he dropped to his knees to be enveloped by the twins made Draco shuffle back awkwardly. His eyes caught on Potter, on the broken look that seemed frozen on his face as his eyes met Arthur Weasley's.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered brokenly, barely audible over the din in the room around them, then cast his eyes down to look once more at the scarred face of the man that lay motionless at their collective feet.

He watched as Potter turned on his heel and made his way through the hall and out into the castle beyond. Unable to worry about Potter and Hermione at the same time, he turned his attention fully to the brunette witch that comforted the redheaded clan around her while tears raced down her own cheeks, her heart clearly breaking, as well.

Okay...so I literally could NOT stand to kill off one of the twins...sorry. But I still felt like it was too unrealistic for the entire Weasley clan to make it through unscathed. Draco's presence in the battle saved Fred's life, there were other battles being fought elsewhere, so don't hate me for killing poor Bill...

sbz