dursley [h. g.]

[harry]

"Are you alright, Harry?" Hermione asked him, intuitive concern filling her eyes from her place next Ron. As soon as he stepped into the Hospital Wing, eyes had darted to him, hoping he had answers. He eyed Hermione numbly, knowing that he had answers, and none of them would be what he wanted to give.

"I'm not hurt," he finally conceded, unable to lie and say he was fine when it felt as though he had just taken two solid blows to the chest one after another. "How's Bill?"

Nobody answered. Harry turned to where Madam Pomfrey stood and he could not recognize the face that sat on Bill's pillow through the still bloodied slashes. Harry swallowed thickly, unable to look away. "Can't you heal them with charms or something?" He finally asked, turning to Madam Pomfrey. She shook her head sadly.

"No charm will work for these," Madam Pomfrey replied grimly. "I've tried everything I can but nothing will work on werewolf bites."

"But he wasn't bitten during the full moon," Ron said, a grim sliver of hope still left in his voice, staring at Bill as though if he stared hard enough his brother would heal. "Greyback wasn't transformed so he won't..." Ron turned to Remus.

"He won't be a true werewolf," Lupin said. "But those are cursed wounds, there will surely be some contamination."

"Mabye Dumbledore will know what to do," Molly spoke up, her voice hoarse from crying.

"Mum, Dumbledore's dead," Ginny said, saying what Harry could not. After his confrontation with Snape, Ginny had found him next to Dumbledore's lifeless body, and though she did not know it, at least in solid terms, Harry had been wishing it had been him instead. Instead of Dumbledore, instead of her, and now, instead of Bill.

"How'd he die?" Tonks whispered from her spot in the corner.

"Snape killed him," Harry said hoarsely, feeling tears well in his throat again. "I saw it. We came back to the astronomy tower, he was ill and weak. Malfoy came in... he was going to do it. Then Snape stepped in and did it. The Avada Kedavra." The words and they took Kendra too were stabbed into the tip of his tongue, stuck there, unable to leap off where his ears might hear them too.

But Hermione, the brightest witch of her age, sometimes to a fault, could look at Harry, the boy who had been her best friend ever since he had saved her from a troll attack in the girl's bathroom's, could look at him and see the words that were trembling to escape his lips and caught there between his unwilling lips. "What else, Harry? Something else happened."

A hot knife ran clean through Harry's heart as he stared at Hermione, unshed tears in her eyes already despite her willingness to prod Harry for more details. He might not have known just how deep the love between Hermione and Kendra ran, but it did not take the brightest one in the room to know that it would shatter Hermione to know. But if she did not know now, when would she find out? When no one could find Kendra as they searched after the smoke had truly cleared? When some other witness attested to having seen her be dragged away by Bellatrix Lestrange again? Guilt flooded Harry's chest, tightening around his heart. He didn't have the heart to watch the heartbreak spread across Hermione's face and he didn't have the heart to wait and let the guilt consume her.

"Kendra's gone," Harry said finally, and the guilt monster in his chest squeezed tighter, stealing the very air out of his lungs. "The Death Eaters took her. She... I don't know."

Hermione looked as though the sun had just fallen out of the sky and doomed the whole world to a slow and painful death as ice-covered everything, staring in Hermione's heart. She took a deep breath, desperately trying to keep the tears in her eyes where they were rather than letting them drip down onto her pale and ashen cheeks. "What don't you know, Harry?" she asked, and whether it was from anger, fear, or raw pain, her voice quivered.

"She looked at me," Harry said, shaking his head. "When I saw she was with the Death Eaters and I was going to go and get her back. And she shook her head like she was telling me not to save her."

"And you let her go?" Hermione asked, the frost from her heart settling into her voice. Harry turned to her, wounded that she would think he could do that, even if she was right.

"I had to," Harry replied, the quiver in his voice giving away his pain before he steeled himself. "If I could have saved her..."

There was silence in the room. There had been too many losses that night, and each one seemed to sting more than the last as they forged together in a snowball to trample the spirits of everyone in the room.

"Maybe she had to do something for Dumbledore," Ron said quietly after a moment. "She was always talking about how she had meetings with him and she couldn't tell anyone what they were about."

"If she had instructions from Dumbledore, it might have been why she shook her head at you like that, Harry," Remus added, Ron's idea giving hope to everyone but the two who had been cut the deepest by her loss.

"Yeah," Harry said, the word so meaningless as it left his mouth that he didn't even recognize the way his tongue moved to form it. "Maybe."

But would Dumbledore really have sent Kendra on what was almost a certain death mission to infiltrate the Death Eaters? As soon as Harry thought it, he knew it was a possibility. Kendra had kept plenty of secrets throughout her life, and the past year was no different. It would explain a lot of things, her meetings with Dumbledore, her disappearing off the map and often reappearing in the same place as Draco Malfoy, her stepping in front of the spell for the boy she might have declared she hated only two years ago. The way Harry could tell she was planning something, even when there seemed to be nothing to plan.

The way she had said goodbye and he had been too thick to recognize what it was.

The more he thought about it, the more it all made sense. But still, the question remained: why would Dumbledore ask her to do this for him? What purpose did her capture serve? And more importantly, would she ever return from it?

As Harry sat down, grief and shock battling in his chest, a shard of his trust for Albus Dumbledore splintered, and a bottomless pit of anxiety for what lay ahead for his best friend, his cousin, and perhaps the only person who ever really understood him, threatened swallowed him completely. 

a/n: guys if you can't tell I'm so hyped to start book four (even though it means my baby is slowly but surely coming to an end 😖) I hope you guys enjoyed this- consider it a little gift for nearly 200k reads!!! you guys are insane! I honestly enjoyed writing from Harry's perspective (I pulled a lot of the dialogue from the book but added my own little touches where I wanted to, which was many places) and maybe that's just because I love hurting my characters 😁 but look for lots of updates (hopefully) in the next few weeks since I'm on holiday break! (Speaking of which, not sure when I'll post this chapter, but Happy Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy Holidays, and if you don't celebrate, I hope your week was still splendid!)

also- still feel free to let me know what you want to see! 

alright that's enough chit chat we all know what we're really here for

this is here solely bc i like the way his name is spelled :)