A/N: Thanks for all reviews! Hmm, can you guess which year this one is set in?
007: Days
Days passed, slowly, agonisingly, unbearably.
They spoke little, to the cracked walls behind each other, avoiding direct gaze. Hollow faces stared, fingers skittered. Muggle lights were erratic, like the movements of one of the other Resistance fighters, the blond youth who never slept. Did anybody? The weather was spoken of - the driving rains, the knifing wind; nothing which could hide the wails of the sirens or the bombs. What they all thought of was never mentioned, and they would retire wordless, to sleep beneath windows.
Her own window commanded a view of the skyline, the sickening lumpiness of trees. Perhaps the pane was chipped - she never noticed. Her retinas held the sight of the blaze beyond, and the raw bloodiness of the sky, and blues and greens and yellows; a rainbow of destruction. She hated those trees.
Days passed.
In the brief moment when she could drag herself away from the window, she faced another glass. Her reflection put its hair into a bun. Her shoulders felt cold.
"It is imperative."
Yet he had nothing on the day he had left, equipped with only a phoenix and a wand. Nobody had said anything, had dared say goodbye. She had leapt up as he'd risen from the bench, but sad sapphire forced her back down. He had done nothing but stare at them - these few who had followed him - who were now broken because they could not. Had the dip of his head been one of respect, gratitude? The half-moons had glinted, and continued to superimpose themselves over distant explosions.
Days passed.
The blindness of the Muggles in the hotel was infuriating.
"Jerry's having fun!"
They could not know that the distant storm was not one of bombs, nor could they realise that she detested them so much that she needed them to continue. They could not know that any silence would be one of death. None of them, not all the Muggle officers in their crumpled uniforms, had understood her sudden rise from the table, or the wordless cry of the blond boy, when a raven had trimmed its black way through the rabid sky. Muggles had not seen the front of the Daily Prophet; the image of a malignant figure bent with cruelty, raven on one shoulder, his single mad eye roving like a gun-sight-
Days passed.
Days passed, days in which the fight had not paused, in which the Dark Lord and his enemy had reddened the clouds with fire and stung the naked eye, in a War of Magi that could only be watched helplessly-
"I'm going there!"
"No you're not, my girl!"
Moody's grip was like a vice. She did not go. She wept, and clawed at Moody, imagining her professor's blood spurting out…
The thunder rolled, and her hands were spread against the pane, ice creeping down her fingers. A tremor reverberated through her bent knees. The tree-line ruptured, like a vessel bursting, and skeletal branches were silhouettes against a fire-storm, scarlet and orange around a white nucleus; buffeting, burning, battering-
Days passed.
A comet came, on the seventh day. The guards on the French border muttered of dreams and nightmares, of a giant swastika drawn in the blood of God. Her straining ears drove her to anger, a false anger that masked a hope. Her vigil at the windowsill was almost broken; she wanted to run down to the khaki uniforms and contradict them - tell them that they had not seen, in some wild glimpse beyond the charms which blinded them, a swastika…
Only a rampant phoenix, flaming in victory.