"My mum was your best friend?"
Severus nodded, groaning low as he pushed himself to his feet. Hermione knew better than to try to help him, so she just stood next to him and tried not to look like she was ready to catch him.
"We grew up across the park from each other," Severus said when he'd got his feet under him. He braced himself against the wall for a moment before standing properly.
"No way!" Ron said, grinning. Severus raised an eyebrow at him.
"I didn't spring forth from the abyss, Weasley," he said. Hermione laughed.
Severus smirked at her and began unbuttoning the sleeves of his teaching robes. They were soaked with his blood, crusty with grime from the floor. He let them drop, then unbuttoned his frock coat, too. The white shirt he wore beneath was red-black with blood around the neck.
"Leave it," he said when Hermione lifted her wand to clean him up a bit. She raised her eyebrows at him. "It will make an impression."
"On whom?"
"Nobody else knows he's dead, Hermione."
"We can't—"
"We have to fight," Harry interrupted.
"We sure as hell don't! Haven't we given enough to this damned—"
"It's almost over," Severus said, fingertips settling on her elbow. "Let's finish it."
"Well, I'm entirely out of anything useful," she snapped, kicking her kit to make her point. Glass clinked inside of it, but it was too heavy to do much else. "If any of you get hurt, it's on you. I won't be able to fix you."
Severus smirked, just a quirk of his lips. Something in her chest unclenched, and it wasn't a comfortable sensation at all.
I almost lost you. I can't lose you. Please—
He tilted her face up to his with a finger under her chin and kissed her gently.
"Er. Can you not?" Ron asked. He looked somewhere between embarrassed and queasy, looking at the broken window instead of them.
Hermione rolled her eyes, but then the school wards vibrated on the edge of her awareness. She couldn't tell what it was, and she looked to Severus. He had stiffened, going so still that Ron blushed.
"Sorry. Er. Sorry, sir. You can—"
"Shut up," Hermione said, waving a hand at him and focusing on Severus. "What was it?"
"A professor crossed the wards under duress."
"That could be anybody. Everybody's under duress right now."
"No. Somebody was forced over the line of the wards."
"Who?"
"That I can't tell."
"How can you tell any of it?" Ron asked.
"I'm the Headmaster of bloody Hogwarts. The wards are constantly sending me information."
"Is that how you knew where the Gray Lady was?" Harry asked her.
"Wait. You were using Legilimency?" Ron asked, frowning.
"No. I'm his wife, Ron."
"So?"
"So the wards get tied to the both of us—" She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Nevermind."
"Quickly," Severus said. He slashed his wand at the front door, and blasted it off its hinges. They left, going slowly at first, Severus shaking off the blood loss.
By the time they reached the gates, they were walking quickly. Severus was in front, long legs eating up the distance. They headed for the courtyard just outside the entrance hall. Most of the people in the castle were concentrated there.
As soon as the great oak doors were in sight, Hermione called up the fog and filled it with balls of bluebell flames.
"You're the one who wanted to make an impression," she reminded Severus when he gave her a look. She fingered his collar, crusty with red-brown now.
He shrugged. They kept on.
"Go around through there," Hermione told Harry, pointing through the side courtyard. As far as she could tell through the wards, there was nobody for him to run into going around that way to the entrance hall. "Tell the Order he's dead. Get them out here."
"Right," Harry said, bumping his fist on Ron's shoulder. The pair of them jogged off into the gloom.
There was a strange, near-absolute silence as Hermione and Severus approached the courtyard. The fog thickened; the people began to get nervous, though nobody moved yet.
The Death Eaters were gathered to one side, fanned out facing the castle. The Order and the students who had stayed, a few Aurors, were spilling out of the hall onto the steps.
"The headmaster is coming," a house elf said somewhere between relief and reverence, its squeaky voice cutting through the quiet. A ripple went through both sides. Minerva grinned like a shark.
Hermione and Severus approached from the side, giving them a view of each group arranged to face each other. On the left, the Death Eaters looked… mean. Feral. On the right, the Order looked lean, tired. She would've thought 'defeated' too, except there was iron in them; the backbone hadn't broken yet.
Hermione raised her wand, enlarging the bluebell flames and sending them out into the fog at the Death Eaters. There were five seconds of quiet confusion before they realized they were being attacked. Then it was screaming chaos.
Lucius Malfoy went down first, then his wife. They twitched, muscle control momentarily overwhelmed by the electric shock making them spasm on the ground.
It wasn't revenge to down them first; it was kindness. Getting them out of the way in exchange for their part (or at least his part) in saving the children.
She poured more power into the bluebell flames after that. Debilitating rather than merely knocking them over. Those caught near a ball of bluebell flames froze, rose into the air. Like Katie Bell so many lifetimes ago (and not so very long ago at all).
Severus moved through the Death Eaters, leaving the dead and dying in his wake. They seemed surprised.
Then the Order joined them, and Hermione let the fog and bluebell flames work without her guidance, stunning rather than killing. She kept close to Severus, deflecting what she needed to, sometimes pulling him bodily out of harm's way. The Death Eaters knew he was against them, but most of the Order seemed unclear on that.
She was trying to duel one of the Lestrange brothers and deflect the curses Molly Weasley kept shooting towards Severus when Harry and Ron burst onto the scene.
"Get down," she shrieked, because they were standing stock still at the top of the stairs, perfectly framed in the door to the entrance hall.
They didn't hear her over the chaos. Beside her, Severus swore.
"Go," he said, spinning to put a wall to his back. She nodded and Apparated to the stairs in front of Harry and Ron.
"Are you stupid? Truly?" Hermione asked, shoving them backwards into the entrance hall.
"They still think they're under orders not to attack me," Harry said.
"Not to kill you," Hermione corrected.
"So cover me."
"What?"
"Sonorous," Harry muttered, wand to his throat, then stepped around Hermione and faced the fighting again. "VOLDEMORT IS DEAD!"
Almost everything stopped. A cheer ran through the defenders of the castle, mostly the students who thought that meant the fighting would stop. The Death Eaters paused, looked at each other, looked at their forearms.
The Dark Mark was gone. She hadn't even thought to look at Severus's arm.
She looked for him. He'd moved from where they'd been. She worried for a moment, because that meant he didn't have a wall for his back—but there he was. Not so very much further. He had found Bellatrix Lestrange.
Bellatrix looked almost like she'd been caught off guard. She backed up steadily as Severus advanced. Spells flew between them, cracking through the air, occasionally rebounding off each other but more often refracting away off Shield Charms.
The fight resumed around her, and yet Hermione couldn't react. It was Ron that yanked her and Harry out of the doorway.
"WHAT—" Harry started, but then realized his voice was still amplified.
"Finite," Hermione said, pointing her wand at his neck. He nodded to her.
"Why don't they stop?"
"Because it's not just about bloody Voldemort, is it?" she snarled at him. "It's not about the stupid prophesy or any of that. They're Death Eaters because it's how they think. They like the fight. They like the man in charge telling them can hurt people, encouraging them to hurt people. And because the Boy Who Lived didn't exist when they started fighting, just them hating people for no good reason."
Harry was looking at her like he'd somehow managed to miss all of that in his introduction to the wizarding community of Britain.
Hagrid bellowed, distracting them. He'd been amidst the Death Eaters, wound up in ropes and with two burly Death Eaters holding him in place.
"We've got to help him," Harry said, dashing off down the stairs.
"Imbecile," Hermione muttered, but followed him.
Light spilled out of the entrance hall behind her, bathing the stone courtyard in gold. It was eerily pretty.
She lost sight of Harry almost immediately. Ron vanished from her side. She couldn't even pinpoint Severus in the crowd. There were fighters all around her. Screaming. The crackle of spells, the crunch of an impact as somebody fell.
A Snatcher—he was too inept to be a Death Eater—stepped in front of her. He sneered, holding his wand out to one side in a sort of mocking 'shall we fight' stance. She punched him in the face, and he stumbled and fell, cracked his head and didn't get up.
Neville ran past her bellowing, waving the Sword of Gyffindor with both hands.
She was aware of a roar from the perimeter wall, adult witches and wizards arriving on the grounds. Grawp was in the courtyard shouting for Hagrid. Hooves and bows twanged as the centaurs arrived.
Hermione almost tripped over a head that had rolled to a stop at her feet when she'd looked up to see the centaurs. It was Bellatrix Lestrange, her jaw hanging loose, half her hair chopped off by the same severing spell that had removed her head. There was a pretty silver swirl on her cheek from the Cruciatus Curse.
There was a bang like a Muggle gun and Hermione was knocked off her feet, throw backwards and up. A thick cord had wrapped around her neck, the spell lifting it up and up, lifting her into the air.
You're a target up here, she thought, as if she wasn't already under attack. As if she didn't have more important things—like strangling—to worry about.
She'd lost her knife long ago. Anything useful in her kit was impossible to get to with it deep in a pocket. She'd managed to keep her wand in her fist, though.
Volare!
She outpaced the rise of the strangling cord, racing higher. She spun in the air, trying not to think about the imminent need to descend, and looked down on the courtyard.
Hagrid had gotten loose and was making good use of his overlarge fists. Minerva and Sprout stood together near the stairs dueling a trio of Death Eaters in full robes and masks. Kinglsey was shouting and pointing, directing a small contingent of Aurors. Harry and Ron had found each other, and most of the D.A. was with them fighting their way to Hagrid.
Severus was dueling Fenrir Greyback. The werewolf was wounded, but it only seemed to make him meaner. Severus was backing up.
A spell—she couldn't tell what it was, but the flash of it was purple—got past Severus's Shield Charm and she lost her focus, began to fall. Entirely without dignity, she flailed, remembered she was a witch, recast the charm but in the wrong direction, and shot off diagonally. She crashed into Greyback, knocking him on his ass. She rolled, elbows tucked, and landed on her belly.
Severus surged to his feet, putting himself between her and Greyback. The werewolf had barely begun to recover, hand feeling around for his wand as he rolled onto his side, when Severus screamed a series of curses, his wand less than a foot away. Greyback sort of crunched in on himself, then flopped sideways. A pair of gray tentacles sprouted from the center of his chest, quivering like they were made of jelly and flopping uselessly over onto the ground.
Greyback shuddered and died. Severus turned to her, and offered a hand up.
"Did he get you?" she asked, using her grip on his hand to pull him behind a column.
"I'm fine."
Their column exploded in a shower of chipped stone and pretty blue sparks.
The fight never seemed to end. The moment one enemy was dispatched, another appeared to take his place. A Dementor very nearly got its lips on a student Hermione didn't recognize; Severus redirected it to Yaxley while she made a Portkey out of a button and sent the boy to the hospital wing. Hagrid ran past waving his pink umbrella, trailed by Grawp. Hermione conjured the Fiendfyre, keeping it small, restricting it to the tiny dragon she'd used when they'd gone into the Department of Mysteries, the one that reminded her of the drawing of Smaug from her childhood copy of "The Hobbit." Her Smaug dashed around friends and through foes, twisting and banking, leaving a flaming wake of ash and the smell of burnt hair.
She didn't think she'd ever get the sound of the screams out of her head.
And then it was over.
Harry and the D.A. had joined up with Kingsley and the Aurors. The remaining Death Eaters had clumped at one side of the courtyard, and then that was it. They were Stunned, disarmed, bound. The D.A. started cheering.
"Four in the corridor outside the kitchens," Severus said, eyes focused on the middle distance as he examined the feedback from the castle wards. "The Carrows are still in Ravenclaw Tower. One at the entrance to Gryffindor Tower. Three in the gallery."
"I'll take the kitchens if you want the other two," Hermione said, and he nodded. The Carrows were neutralized; they could wait.
The presences detected by the wards outside the kitchen didn't register as student or teacher, and it turned out to be the Lupins facing off against a pair of Death Eaters. She Apparated to the end of the hall just in time to see Tonks blast the taller Death Eater back into a wall, and then the remaining Death Eater collapsed the ceiling on them.
Sectumsempra!
She should have disarmed him and wrapped him in ropes, immobilized him. She should've stopped the bleeding enough that he'd survive. But she didn't. She stood over him and watched him bleed out.
She didn't feel anything.
The taller Death Eater began to come around, and she twitched, jabbing her wand at him. Levicorpus! He hung upside down, flailing his arms and swearing while Hermione waited for the other one to finish dying. Then she conjured ropes and pocketed his wand, casting a Silencing Spell on him when he wouldn't stop shouting at her.
It was too easy to magic the huge chunks of stone off Remus and Tonks. It should have been harder. It should have taken more effort to shift the mass that killed them.
Somehow, they had died holding hands.