"Let me help you!" she cried over the howling winds, her hand reaching out towards him.
"No one can help me Hermione… leave… leave now!" he said coldly, refusing to take her hand, refusing what she was so readily offering.
He must have been a fool, to not take that hand. But he was unredeemable, there was nothing she could do, there was nothing anyone could do.
"Just follow through with my promise; please… just do what I told you to. That is the only way you can help me." He said, his voice faint over the sound of crashing waves and shrieks from the wind.
Hermione was pale, the wind sounded like it was being tortured… like someone was rapidly Crucioing it into insanity. The howls and cries made her cringe, each of them fell on her ear like a bolt of lightning.
Black clouds moved over the dwindling sun, covering everything in endless shadows. That was were monsters breed Hermione thought with a shudder, Draco felt like he belonged here, among these monsters.
"Draco please!" she cried, "Please don't disappear into the darkness! You don't belong here!"
He couldn't look back, because he knew that if he looked back he would want to return and there was no way he could return.
"There is no place for a beast like me, among your kind." He snarled, trying but failing to push her away.
"Draco you are not a beast…." Hermione whispered, praying that the unfriendly wind would carry her voice.
"Hermione Granger… you of all people should know that there are beasts much worse than the kind found among the wild." Came a new voice, cold and cruel. Its harsh tones ripped at Hermione, tugging on her heart and creating a coat of ice around it. "Draco is one such beast, I have made sure he is." Said the same voice, ending on a sinister laugh that made the trees around her shudder and quake and the shadows to dance in fear.
"DRACO! Don't listen!" she yelled over the wind, "Please come back, please…"
Around them there seemed to be a wall erected, like the wind was pulling her away from him and the shadows were dragging him back into the darkness.
"Fight!" she cried, "Fight them, come back for me!"
But Draco was a coward, a weak- pathetic coward, he couldn't fight… there was too much at stake, so he just looked at her with his sad gray eyes, eyes that glinted with the darkness of a beast and fear of a child, "Let me go…." He said, "Let me go because there is nothing more I can do." And he stood, letting each of his own inadequacies, each of his own sins, his fears, his lies drag him back into the depths of the mire that he knew he would never emerge from.
And she watched him go with the same kind of sadness that a war torn country's widow watches her husband go, knowing in her heart that he may never return, that he may never kiss her again, never touch her again.
That was absurd… no one in Draco's life had ever looked at him like that.
Like they might actually miss him and for a moment he got the strength to fight but he pushed it down savagely….
Hermione watched as the shadows swallowed him whole and felt the salty tears dripping down her face.
Infront of her was the most misunderstood hero of all, the hero who couldn't spread his wings because he knew they were broken from the day he first discovered them, a hero who would never hear adulation, praise, applause or even a compliment because he died a man surrounded in black, here was a hero so lost in his own pain and fear that he could never hope to emerge, here was a hero who died the death of an animal.
Yet a hero he was all the same…
And then she woke, her body covered by sweat and her mind buzzing with the faint strains that remained of her nightmare….
….
Please do review :) I never planned for a second part but I just had so much angst inside of me today that I couldn't help writing this :D You may draw your own conclusions on what happened after this.