Forty-One
It's been ten minutes. Hermione's been standing in the entrance corridor of the Order's mansion estate, where she can see the grandfather clock in the formal parlour. Teddy Lupin is currently playing on the floor despite it being well past his bedtime, stacking wooden blocks – his grandmother trying to hide her strain and worry as she helps him. Hermione slips away, her trainers silent on the rug as she approaches the front doors. She pulls one large, heavy door open very carefully and silently, and then stifles a shriek, clamping her hand over her mouth as Ginny appears beside her, a determined expression on her freckled face.
"You're going to the battle, aren't you?" she asks as Hermione's heart attempts to beat out of her chest. She drops her hand, glaring at Ginny as she keeps a hold on the door so it doesn't slam and give them both away.
"What are you –"
"I'm coming with you. Side-along. If you don't let me, I'll scream," she whispers.
"Ginny!" Hermione whisper-yells.
"I'm an adult, and I can fight. I want to fight. But instead, I'm locked away here because Harry, Ron, and Mum and Dad want to keep me safe," she says bitterly, her voice quiet, her chin high and wand clutched in her hand.
"You haven't fought in a battle since Hogwarts," Hermione begins weakly, and Ginny gives her a scathing look as if taking in the way she's trembling slightly with sheer terror, the very image of inept panic.
"Don't start. If I shouldn't be fighting, you definitely shouldn't." The redhead's expression shifts. "Please. I have to be there. Harry –" Her voice breaks, and she clamps her lips shut. She's ashen, and Hermione knows exactly what Ginny was about to say because it's what she was thinking herself about Draco. It's why she's going despite being so scared she feels dizzy.
"Come on then," she says in a whisper and slips out the door. Ginny's shoulders slump momentarily as she exhales in relief, and then she's following Hermione out, pulling the mansion's door very quietly shut behind her. They hurry toward the disapparition point at a swift trot – it's impossible to be quiet on the damp gravel, and their trainers crunch. It sounds ridiculously loud. "Quickly," she says, her heart racing, glad that at least it's not raining. Fear is sharp in her veins; it's icy hot, and sweat breaks out all over her body under her warm clothes as she runs through scenarios in her mind.
What if she sees the wizards from the dinner? What if she runs into a Snatcher and freezes up? She won't, Hermione tells herself determinedly. She can't afford to. When she went on missions, she held her own. She was an efficient, effective fighter. And that's what she'll be now. She has to be. For Draco. Uncertainty curdles sour in her belly.
She and Ginny hold hands, both of their palms clammy, and Hermione pictures the thick woods. The large, flat, half-buried stone they'd stood on, where she'd crushed the portkey under her boot. Her hat had fallen off, abandoned and forgotten. He'd told her he loved her like it was a confession of sin, and then he'd kissed her as though he was going to his death. Because he'd been planning on it. She pictures that moment – forcing herself to focus on the woods and the stone instead of him, so they don't try to apparate to the mansion and get splinched – and then they snap away.
They land with a thud on solid ground, the sound of rain beating down against the trees loud – an assault on her ears. The canopy seems to be stopping a lot of the rain, which then rolls down the leaves in trickles and runnels. Hermione backs up a sharp step as a water-laden leaf somewhere above collapses and water splashes over her cheek, cold and shocking. Ginny turns away and retches, nauseated from the apparition, and Hermione feels sick too, but she's busy staring at the ground as she swipes her sleeve over her wet cheek. Her hat. Dirty and sodden, the knitted cap is somehow still there. She shuts her eyes for a handful of racing heartbeats and remembers that evening. The desperation and love in his voice.
She opens her eyes in time to see sheet lightning blaze across the sky, everything shining stark white and black for a moment, dappled and sliced by the shadows of the trees. The after-image of the woods is seared into Hermione's retinas, and white and black dots sparkle in her vision as she turns her eyes to Ginny. In this light, the other witch is ghostly pale, her eyes dark pits, her mouth a thin line. The thunder crashes and booms, close enough that Hermione ducks down a little on instinct, terror spiking. It feels and sounds overwhelming, and both witches are frozen, looking up, as it rumbles into quiescence again.
"Shit," Ginny says, her hair already halfway to wet from the splashes of collected rainwater plopping down on them both. "Now that's a storm."
"Come on." Hermione looks around herself, getting her bearings, wiping her arm across her eyes. In the distance, through the trees and the rain, she can see the occasional faint spark of spellwork. That has to be the mansion. "Let's go. This way."
They run at a fast jog, side by side, with their trainers squelching on the wet ground, occasionally sliding and slipping on patches of slick moss. More than once they have to steady each other or grab onto trees for stability, and at one point, Hermione nearly runs into a rogue tree branch. The smaller twiggy branches coming off it to scrape her forehead as she ducks, and she pats at the stinging scrapes. No blood. She's fine. Her adrenaline is rising as she runs. Her blood pumping, her heart galloping, her breath coming in controlled, deep drags, in through her nose and out through her mouth. She feels dizzy anyway. And her hands feel shaky.
The storm is in full force, lightning flaring or forking across the sky, the thunder like artillery fire – ground-shaking booms that nearly hurt her ears. There's no counting in between the two; the storm is directly overhead. Hermione remembers what she said to Draco about being hit by lightning and hopes she avoids that fate as the two witches stumble to a stop at the edge of the woods, panting and halfway to soaking wet. Hermione braces herself against a tree with one hand, the bark rough under her palm. There's an expanse of manicured lawn – Hermione remembers crossing it with her heart in her throat – and then the forbidding manor house, looming up into the night. And behind it, the walled gardens, a sprawling collection of different areas, laid out neatly and joined by gravel paths.
She remembers looking at them all from the window of Draco's room. Their room. A herb garden all laid out beautifully in geometric shapes, another garden centred around a memorial statue of some sort with benches all around, one secluded area with a small pond, and then another larger section that was a small orchard with trees in rows. There are so many gardens. But it's the hedge maze that sits at the centre that Hermione had always been drawn to. The most interesting feature of the gardens. Her eyes are drawn back to the house as lightning emblazons everything with stark contrast, lighting it up, and she swallows hard as memories clamour.
Humiliation, and pain, and the kind of violation that will always haunt her dreams. Part of her will never leave that house. The thunder crashes.
"Hermione?" Ginny touches her arm lightly, and Hermione startles and flinches away, gasping for air as fright and horror tear through her. "Are you sure you can do this?" Ginny asks her gently, and Hermione swipes away hot tears that mingle with the rain splatting down on her and nods.
"Yes. Yes, I'm fine. It's just the first time I've seen it since –" She breaks off, but she doesn't have to say any more. Ginny understands. The redhead scrapes her wet hair back off her face and twists it in a makeshift braid, tucking the tail down the back of her jacket. Hermione straightens and tries to pull herself together consciously. She tries to compartmentalise the way she knows Draco does. Feelings all crushed down, her focus at the forefront. She needs to go in there, she needs to kill every one of the enemies she comes across, and she needs to find Draco. And fight beside him, until Voldemort is defeated. She firms her jaw, takes a deep breath, and nods.
"Follow me," she tells Ginny, and sets off at a run through the pouring rain, toward a spot in the wall that looks different. It's hard to see in the dark and the rain, but Hermione thinks that's the wrought iron gate they escaped through, that Draco unlocked. She isn't sure if he used alohomora or knew a password, but if it doesn't unlock, they'll figure it out. The rain is like needles, stinging her face, and her jeans are getting sodden with it. And although her jacket seems to be mostly repelling it for now, it's running down the back of her neck and slowly soaking her shirt. She should've cast an Impervius Charm, but she hadn't been thinking. Clearly, Ginny hadn't either. They both need to get their heads in the game.
There's no point now though, Hermione thinks as her trainers sink muddy footprints into a once-manicured lawn, and they near the stone wall. Once they start fighting, they'll have no concentration spare for superfluous charms. She flinches as lightning flares, and there's a crack. She spins, heart in her throat. A tree that stands just out from its fellows at the tree line is aflame, fire leaping up fiercely enough that even the heavy rain doesn't extinguish it. "Oh my god," she says to herself, and then turns and keeps running, seeing the gate now and angling for it. Beyond, above the internal walls and hedges, she can see the occasional bolt of light and hear the faint crack of spells. Alohomora doesn't work.
"Shit," she mutters, shooting Ginny a squinting glance through the rain, wiping her face again. "We could climb the wall?" Except it's lined with iron spikes jutting up. She supposes they could levitate each other over.
"Or…" Ginny says. "Back up, Hermione?" The witch backs up herself, moving away from the gate.
"I don't think that's a good idea, Ginny. That'll just –" Hermione begins even as she backpedals, because she can see the redhead isn't listening "– alert everyone," she finishes, the protest lost beneath Ginny's spell.
"Bombarda!" The gate blows inward, along with a section of wall on either side, in an explosion that outcompetes the thunder for a moment. Dust billows up and stones go flying, along with pieces of iron, and Hermione flings up a protego. A piece of iron goes bouncing off the top of the shield. It would've gone over Hermione's head, but that was too close.
"Jesus, Ginny!" she shouts over the noise of rain and thunder, and settling debris. "You nearly killed us!"
"We're fine!" Ginny says as she trots through the opening into the smallish garden with the large statue of a wizard in the centre, standing on an impressive plinth, the stone walls all topped with tall iron spikes. "Better than messing about. We don't have time to waste – we have to find the others."
"And you've alerted everyone in the area that we're here!" Hermione yells, frustrated, regretting bringing Ginny. And then, as if on cue, what seems to be a group of Snatchers comes jogging around the corner. Four of them. They pull up short when they see Hermione and Ginny, and one of them grins, a nasty, leering expression. Hermione feels a bolt of cold horror slam straight through her. She is catapulted back to the moment the Snatchers first grabbed her, her broken wand clutched uselessly in her hand. The way she'd fought and struggled uselessly as they'd beaten her into insensibility and taken her to the dungeons.
She's vaguely aware of Ginny grabbing her by the sleeve and dragging her behind the statue's plinth as she gasps for air, locked in her own head. She remembers the moment the Snatchers came into the cell and found her lying there, trying fruitlessly to hide. Ginny hurls off confringos. The way they'd hit her. The pain slamming through her. Her face swollen and tight. She'd fought, and she'd failed. She remembers, acutely, as Ginny shakes her, hissing her name, the sick helplessness she'd felt as they'd stripped her trousers and underwear down. The Snatcher's erection prodding against her.
And then Draco had been there, panting and dishevelled from his desperate sprint down to the dungeons, the charm having alerted him she was in danger. He'd saved her. He'd always saved her, from everything that he could. And she was failing him now.
"I'm okay," she gasps out, blinking and shaking herself, and adjusting her grip on her wand. She's crouching behind the plinth, her back to the cold, wet marble, her wand in her hand and Ginny crouched in front of her, facing her as she shoots off spells, holding the Snatchers at bay. Bolts of coloured magic fly past. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm okay now." Ginny spares her a quick glance.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure." Hermione nods and then pushes off the plinth, shuffling over to the other side of it, and peeking around the corner, just one eye and the top of her head visible. A Snatcher approaches, having figured out that only one side of the plinth is being defended, his guard down as he looks around at his eye level, and Hermione grits her teeth. She can do this. She has a wand now. She's not helpless anymore. She slashes off a diffindo, the spell she'd always favoured when she used to go on missions, if she was fighting to kill rather than capture. The movement is easy for her to repeat swiftly, and it's precise, efficient, and not overly messy – so long as one stands clear of the blood.
She catches the Snatcher across the throat right as he finally spots her crouched there, his eyes widening, lifting his wand as his mouth opens – whether to spit a spell or warn the others she'll never know, because her diffindo opens a great, gaping slash across his throat. He gurgles and clutches at his throat, panic in his eyes as the blood gouts out in pulsing spurts, going a surprising distance. She swallows down on nausea. Hermione has never liked death, and causing it herself has always sickened her. But she doesn't look away as the wizard stumbles forward a step – sways, the pulsing flow of blood weakening – and then drops to the wet ground. Collapsing like a puppet with his strings cut.
"Geoff?" one of the remaining three Snatchers calls, barely audible over a crash of thunder and then Ginny hisses "Confringo!" again. There's a yelp of disgust and hoiking noises, followed by spitting, as though a Snatcher has just caught a faceful of his friend.
"You bitch!" one of the Snatchers yells, distorted by rage.
"Confringo!" Ginny yells again – she clearly favours that spell – and a Snatcher laughs.
"Missed me!"
A Snatcher comes into view on Hermione's side, a shield up and shimmering, and she bites her tongue hard enough to hurt, concentrating. She refuses to let herself focus on her fear. "Bombarda!" she hisses, and aims it at the ground just in front of the Snatcher. He flails backward, hardly visible through the explosion of dirt and mud, but Hermione thinks his shield drops, which was the plan. She flings off three diffindos in a row, and he screams and then comes stumbling at her, wounds opened across his abdomen spilling blood. He's like some Halloween monster. "Depulso!" she yells in panic, followed by a sectumsempra. He goes flying across the small garden, hitting the stone wall, more wounds opening up across his face and body from the sectumsempra before he falls to the ground, face first in a growing pool of blood and water.
"Merlin," Ginny breathes from over Hermione's shoulder, "that's brutal." Hermione squeaks with fear, clutching at her chest.
"Stop scaring me!" she gasps as she twists to look at the other witch.
"Sorry. My two are dead," Ginny says brightly, mimicking an explosion with her two hands, cheeks puffing out as she makes the noise. "I love a good confringo. I can see yours are well dead, too. Bastards." Ginny seems like she's running on adrenaline, the reality not yet having sunk in. She'll crash later, Hermione thinks, when she processes the fact that she's actually killed people. As far as Hermione knows, Ginny didn't use lethal spells at the Battle of Hogwarts.
"Good work," she says as she pushes herself to her feet, feeling wobbly and shaky now, in the wake of that brief rush of terror and adrenaline. She's still tense and scared, but the immediate danger has passed now, and it leaves her feeling weak and limp. They won. She can hardly believe it. She may have frozen, but then she was okay, and she killed them both, quickly and efficiently, without letting her panic overwhelm her. A feeling of pride blooms in her chest, beneath the fear and relief. Hermione breathes heavily, rain trickling over her face as another flash of lightning illuminates everything white, and both witches look up, waiting for the boom of thunder that comes just one hippopotamus later.
"Shit," Ginny says when the rumble is done. She looks around herself, a grim, somehow exhilarated look on her face. Chin up and eyes gleaming, muscles tight. She looks poised. Alert. Triumphant. Hermione shares the feeling of triumph, but she feels shaky to Ginny's coiled tension. The redhead turns in a circle, her wet braid somewhat worse for wear. Aside from the gate to the outside of the estate, there are doors in all three walls. "Where do we go now?"
"Where they came from, I suppose," Hermione says, gesturing to her two dead Snatchers. They both move around the statue toward the open garden gate, moving at a quick walk, tension rising again. Her wand is slippery in her hand thanks to the rain, and Hermione tightens her grip. They pass through the gate into a narrow walled and tree-lined walk, and look around again. "There!" Hermione says at the same moment as Ginny, both pointing toward the stray spells they can see flying above the walls, toward the left. They both start jogging in that direction down the avenue, wands up and ready, and then just as they turn right at an intersection, her hair stands on end, there's the smell of ozone in the air, and an explosion hits.
A wall of heated air and pieces of tree hit Hermione like a giant fist as a sound rattles through her head as if it has been thunderclapped, and she goes tumbling back – clinging desperately to her wand, pressing that hand against her chest in an attempt to protect it. She hits the ground hard, shielding her wand still. She can't break another wand, she thinks with a rational corner of her mind, even as the rest of her thoughts splinter.
Hot, hurts, that was lightning, lightning hit that tree, she thinks, bewildered and aching, her ears ringing as though her head is a struck gong, unable to hear anything as she scrambles achingly to her feet.
The tree is on fire and ripped nearly in two, and as Hermione stumbles, looking for Ginny, there's another explosion – dull to her deafened ears this time, and the wall to her right blows out in a hail of stone debris, and a cloud of dust. She scrambles back, the wand ready and a shield up, looking around wildly for Ginny, screaming for her, but she can't even hear her own voice. No one comes through the hole in the wall, but the debris blocks access to that branch of the gardens – unless Hermione tries to scramble over the stones, which doesn't seem safe. She yells for Ginny again but hears nothing.
Fuck. For a moment, she doesn't know what to do, frozen by indecision and rising fear. And then she sees a bolt of red flying above the walls to her left, and turns in that direction. She can't do anything for Ginny now, but she can still find Draco. Ginny will be okay, she tells herself. She takes off down the avenue on wobbly legs, shaking herself mentally – she's alive, and she has her wand, and Ginny is fine, she tells herself. And then a figure skids out into the walk up ahead, and Hermione squints through the rain, raising her shield. She can't see who it is this far away. But they lash a curse at her, and it's the sickly green of the Killing Curse. An enemy.
Hermione stumbles sideways, dodging the curse and then flattening herself against the trunk of a tree, taking whooping breaths, her head and ears aching viciously and her limbs feeling weak and shaky. She takes a second to calm herself and then she readies her wand, fear and panic still thrilling through her veins even as she tries to focus. And then she peeks out from behind the tree and sees the figure striding in her direction. Shit. She slashes off a diffindo, followed by an incendio, and then a depulso, all three of which are blocked or deflected, and then raises a shield, still in the shelter of the tree. Hermione hopes rather fervently that it doesn't get struck by lightning as she settles in, ready to duel, her heart racing and her fingertips tingling. She'll be okay, she tells herself. She'll win.