DISCLAIMER: In its use of intellectual property and characters belonging to J.K. Rowling, Warner Bros., Bloomsbury Publishing, et cetera, this work is intended to be transformative commentary on the original. No profit is being made from this work.

BETA READER: silverbluewords

THE SECOND WAVE

Hermione had never really cared for horror movies. She indulged in them every once in a while, mainly for the sole purpose of mindless entertainment and scoffing in disdain at the sheer ludicrousness of it all. She and Harry always had to fight to stifle each other's mirth every time Ron raced over to the telly, distraught and besieged with panic, pleading with the poor souls trapped inside to run. Her parents, whom she'd brought back from Australia straight after the War and had since forgiven her for her infringement upon their memories, had found Ron's reactions most amusing, and had even invited him to join them on their next family outing to the cinema. But in all honesty, monstrous creatures and bloodthirsty un-dead didn't faze her in the least. She'd met people in her life far more bestial and far less human than even the most slimy, fanged fiend of the night that had ever scuttled across the big screen.

But now, looking down at the mauled and convulsing hulk of flesh that would soon cease to identify itself as Anthony Goldstein, she suddenly lost the urge to laugh it all away. She didn't want to face the truth. She didn't want to acknowledge that the movies she'd once ridiculed and scorned had somehow crawled their way into her reality. That for all her magical knowledge, she felt as trapped and helpless as the terrified Muggles in her telly. That despite all her efforts to survive, to make a name for herself in this world where she so desperately wanted to belong, she found herself fighting once more—not for the right, but the privilege, to live.

They'd come out of nowhere. Rising from the ground, swarming out of the trees, straggling up the mountainside. Legions upon legions of ravenous un-dead. Less than five kilometres into their trek, a teeming mass of groaning, reanimated corpses had clambered towards their feast, engulfing the professor and dragging her under in an undulating tempest of ashen limbs and blackened teeth as they devoured her where she stood. Together, they ravaged the tender, malleable flesh with relishing smacks of their peeling lips. Even as her screams rattled throughout the shivering trees, the creatures tore her open, clawed out her innards, and sloppily unravelled them, each creature munching mindlessly along the splattered cords of her bowels.

Panic had ensued, and the paltry, eight-member group of horrified teens scattered in all directions as they hastened to escape. Misfired spells went whizzing past Hermione's ears as she fled the area. Fortunately, the monsters seemed too preoccupied with their newly acquired meal to give much chase. But a few towards the back of the crowd, that couldn't quite reach the warm confection in the centre, slowly began to stray in search of other options.

Then, Anthony dropped his wand, and against Hermione's urgent screams, he ran back for it. He just couldn't run fast enough. And she, the foolish Muggle-born, hadn't thought to use a Summoning Charm to retrieve his wand for him until he lay torn and howling upon the coarse, desecrated dirt.

As she'd blasted the flesh-eaters off of him, levitated what remained of his body into the nearest clearing, and erected a series of hasty wards, she had no strength left to stanch the bleeding of images that besieged her. She told herself over and over again that they meant nothing to her—nothing but mere memories, suppressed and smothered out of sight. Nothing but doubts that mocked and tormented her in the silence of her own mind.

Already, in her first year, the cracks had begun to show...

"So light a fire!" Harry choked.

"Yes—of course—but there's no wood!" Hermione cried, wringing her hands.

"HAVE YOU GONE MAD?" Ron bellowed. "ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?"

Suddenly, the scene shifted, and she saw Umbridge's simpering face as she smirked at Mary Cattermole:

"Wands only choose witches or wizards. You are not a witch."

And last, but not least, the boy who'd first called her that hateful word, so many years ago...

"No one asked your opinion, you filthy little Mudblood."

Stupid.

Useless.

Inferior.

She retched, the acrid bile searing her tongue as it crawled its way up her throat. The smell of coagulating blood and decaying flesh permeated her lungs, causing her to heave until her ribs creaked in protest. She could still phantom-hear the hungry groans, the uneven lurching of dragged limbs, and Anthony's guttural cries. Her eyes burned and her vision swam, but she couldn't bring herself to shed a single tear. No more. Not again. After the War, she felt as if she had no tears left. She had nothing—nothing—left to give to the poor woman who had served as their teacher for a few sparse weeks. The teacher who everyone had hoped would finally bring an end to the curse that had plagued the doomed position for so long. She couldn't even bring herself to cry for this boy whom she hardly knew, but whose life had brought as much happiness to the ones who loved him as she hoped she did to the ones who loved her. Perhaps people didn't always live equal lives, but they all died the same.

"ANTHONY!" Padma screamed. She stumbled into the clearing, her face ravaged by grief and her eyes demented with denial. "ANTHONY, NO!"

"P—Padma," Anthony weakly spluttered back, coughing and choking on his own blood. Whimpering and trembling with the effort, he reached out towards the sound of her voice, only to let out a gurgling cry at the sight of the bloodied stump where an imprint of human teeth had replaced his hand. "H—help me! Padma, help me! PADMA, PLEASE!"

Hermione immediately lunged forward and seized Padma, wrenching her away from Anthony's side. "What are you doing?" Padma shrieked, blindly kicking at her. "Let me go, damn you! LET ME GO!"

"I'm sorry, Padma, but I can't do that," Hermione informed her, as firmly and steadily as her shaking voice could manage. "There's too much blood, and I can't risk you getting infected."

"But he's alive! He's alive!" she insisted, her words tainted with desperation. "He knows me! He knows my name!"

"For now," interrupted a cold voice. "But give him another half an hour, and he'll be one of them."

Draco Malfoy had entered the clearing, his eyes as dark and unyielding as stone, followed by a snivelling Pansy Parkinson, two gasps of horror from Ernie and Hannah, and a white-faced Ron, who, upon seeing her, rushed forward and crushed Hermione to him. Padma crumpled onto the ground, sobbing uncontrollably. "Somebody fucking do something!" she wailed.

Hermione had nothing to say to her—nothing that would absolve her of her complete and utter negligence. All of her guilt, anxiety, and insecurities collapsed in on her, and she held herself responsible for her classmate's distress. Her relief at reuniting with the rest of the group dissipated almost instantaneously as she caught sight of Malfoy's blackened eyes. He'd clenched his jaw, glaring at her with the utmost revulsion. Hermione swallowed, and gently disentangled herself from Ron's embrace.

She knew that he must blame her for failing to save Anthony, just as she'd failed to save countless other innocent lives during the War. They died, and she survived—the Mudblood who didn't deserve a wand, didn't deserve to just trespass into their world and take everything away from them, didn't deserve to tread upon the ground that lay soaked with their magical blood. Mudblood and proud, she'd once said. Now, she knew the ugly truth.

"Slytherin's soul," murmured Parkinson, gaping at Anthony's writhing form. She glanced wildly about. "What are you lot all standing around for? Burn him!"

Padma thrashed and wrung out her hair in despair. Ernie and Hannah scrambled to her side in a vain attempt to shush and console the normally collected and reasonable Padma, both looking equally horrified and on the verge of tears and sickness themselves. Padma, unlike her gossiping twin sister, possessed cool intellect and a strong work ethic. Seeing her in this state brought Hermione out of her self-imposed turmoil. She'd always hated Pansy Parkinson, but her unforgivable lack of tact at a moment like this impelled Hermione to loathe the insensitive cow even more than she loathed herself.

"Shut it, Parkinson," snarled Ron. "You don't even give a shite whether he lives or dies. You're only out to save your own skin, just like when you tried to hand Harry over to that murdering bastard! I'm surprised you can even show your ugly mug in public, you pug-faced bitch!"

"Pansy's right," interjected Malfoy, cutting across Parkinson's indignant screeches of protest. "And clearly, you don't even know what the fuck you're talking about, Weasley. You want to stay here and coddle Goldstein? Be my guest. Saint Potter won't be here to save you when he wakes up and turns your bog-standard insides into his next meal."

Following Malfoy's ominous assertions, Anthony's moans had slowly begun to quail in both intensity and frequency, until finally, they subsided altogether and he laid limp and unresponsive upon the forest floor, seemingly unconscious, his soul fleeing his body in winding rivulets that pooled in patches beneath their dying host.

"So, it's kill or be killed, is it, Malfoy? Brilliant! Is that what you told yourself when you tried to snuff Dumbledore? Fat lot of good it did you, you sick fuck," sneered Ron. "How do you live with yourself?"

Ron had gone too far. The moment she saw Malfoy's eyes narrow into slits and his right hand making a sudden movement towards his wand, she threw herself in front of Ron and shrieked, "STOP IT, BOTH OF YOU!"

Alternating her wand between the two murderous glares that skewered her from both ends, she reasoned, "Look, Malfoy, I know what you're saying, and I'm certainly not disagreeing with you, but you're not the one who's losing a friend! You're not the one who's losing someone you care about! It's easy for you to say it's the sensible thing to do, but if it were you, would you able to do it? Would you be able to condemn someone you loved to death?"

"HA! Love? That's rich," Ron snorted with disdain. "Look at what his own parents did to him! Look at the fuckwits that he calls friends! They don't even know how to spell the word, let alone figure out what it means—"

"That's enough, Ronald!" Hermione snapped. "Not another word out of you! Do you hear? You are needlessly escalating an already precarious situation, and you should be ashamed of yourself! The professor's dead, and like it or not, we all have to work together if we want to get out of here alive, so grow up, will you?"

She turned back to Malfoy, determined to berate him as well, but paused at the strange, unfathomable expression on his face. His eyes bored into her with frightening intensity, and she couldn't help staring back, thrilled by a sort of morbid fascination. She'd grown accustomed to his arrogance, his scorn, and his cold indifference, but not this. He hadn't looked at her that way, not since the day she'd given him his wand back, but now, she saw it again—a glimpse into the unimpeded depths that coursed beneath the ice. Suddenly, she had the urge to flee, to back away, before she lost herself in them and couldn't pull herself back out. He looked at her as if he wanted to drown her. Her breath hitched in her throat and her pulse accelerated. She couldn't breathe. He would suffocate her…

"If it were someone I cared about, Granger, I wouldn't hesitate to end that person's misery," he quietly told her. "I would rather deliver the finishing blow myself than watch that person turn into a monster. And in the end, it wouldn't matter, because I know that I'll be close behind." She didn't have to ask him what he meant by remaining close behind. She knew what he meant, and she believed him. Everything, from his muted voice to his stormy eyes, reflected such inner turmoil that a part of her irrationally longed to reach out to him, but he'd already turned away. Sensing that all imminent danger had passed, she lowered her wand. But in the back of her mind, she silently wondered what sort of person could inspire Draco Malfoy, of all people, to testify to something so wretchedly impassioned, and least of all, to her. So, the boy with the eyes of stone had feelings after all.

He strode past Padma as she desperately fought to cling to her final hope, her pleas falling on deaf ears. Impassively, he disentangled himself from the distraught witch and forged on, his black cloak rippling in his wake as he hoisted Anthony up into the air with a mechanical flick of his wand. Hidden behind its cloudy fortress, the moon paled, shedding ghostly slivers upon his ascension as he rose out of reach of the trees and the foliage strewn across the forest floor. Small, red droplets trickled down onto the ground, joining the steadily receding puddle that slowly seeped into the dampened and thirsty earth.

Hermione couldn't take it anymore. She tore her eyes away, not wanting to see what happened next. She refused to engrave the last memory of her classmate into her heart as a pale, living corpse floating above them, looking down on her for her failure. Trembling beneath the terrible weight of her transgressions, she silently cursed the translucent, dome-shaped barrier that stretched overhead—the barrier that isolated the reservation from the outside world and wouldn't allow them to leave. Not without a fight. Gazing out across the darkening horizon, she kept her eyes riveted in the direction of the Portkey that she knew would get them out of this godforsaken place.

Only after she heard Malfoy's voice firmly enunciate "Incendio!" did she finally allow her tears to fall.

"I'm sorry, Anthony," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."

TO BE CONTINUED