:::Choices:::
Winter raged on, frozen and forlorn. The days passed by, turning into weeks. The hours were long, and yet they knew time was running short... running out. The war was coming—the trio knew that, could see it on the horizon, could feel it in their bones.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione sat in the Gryffindor common room, silent amidst the gentle murmur of their housemates, each lost in their own grim thoughts. Harry had dreamt of the war every night for weeks, vivid, violent dreams that offered nothing new, nothing except a growing sense of dread. Each nightmare was a blur, colorful and chaotic, showing bits and pieces of an undefined picture, creating a puzzle with jagged pieces that wouldn't fit together.
The Slytherin biography he'd reluctantly bought for Hermione was in his lap, opened to one of the final pages. He was the one obsessed with it now, studying it relentlessly, trying to quell this feeling of helplessness that kept spreading wider and wider inside of him. He had all the names and types of strategies memorized, but he knew none if it meant a goddamned thing—as it was, without a full department of Aurors to defend them, the odds that their militia could defeat Voldemort's army were less than slim.
Harry's tired gaze moved to Hermione. Her eyes were dull, as if the life inside of her was slowly seeping into some dark abyss far from reach. It was like they were in some kind of time warp, like they were back to the days before Malfoy had found her on the cliffs beneath the balcony...
She hadn't told them what had changed, but somehow Harry knew she had seen Malfoy—and it was obvious that the bastard had been merciless. What else would reduce her to the ghost of a girl she'd been before he had saved her, before he'd made her believe he actually cared?
Now it was almost as if all that had never happened, almost as if she had never been happy or healthy at all. The boys tried to get her to eat, to smile, to laugh—but there was so little to laugh about now that they couldn't be convincing. Their worlds were falling apart piece by piece. The uncertainty of tomorrow loomed all around like a tornado threatening to breeze through and sweep everything they loved away in one destructive whirl of wind.
No new information had been found about the Cruor Unum, and Hermione had ceased to care. She hadn't really held out any hope on that score to begin with. It didn't matter anymore, anyway... didn't matter that she was cursed, that her life was at Voldemort's disposal, in his hands. It didn't matter that she might not live through the war—or that the curse might mean she would be the only one to live through it.
None of it mattered anymore. Deep inside she wondered if it ever had.
The truly pathetic part was that she was still in love with Draco. She laughed at herself, an empty sound. She loved someone who didn't even exist—had never existed. It wasn't even a memory she loved, but a fantasy—a lie she had believed, a wish she had never really made and so had never really come true. Yet even as all hope had become lost, as the dream had ended and reality had sunken back in, that dying ember—that single flickering flame—was the only thing inside of her that still held some warmth or glow. It was a mockery, though, and she wished it gone. She wished—for the first time, truly wished—that all feeling would die and she could be completely cold.
She could feel her body slowly weakening with each passing day, but she didn't mind. There was nothing left for her... nothing left of her, nothing but that single faded strand of love—and soon, she prayed, there wouldn't even be that. So it didn't matter. Her body could shut down completely for all she cared.
She was already as good as dead.
The air in Upton Parkinson's library was crisp with winter chill despite the fire that crackled wildly in the hearth. Draco stood stoic at one Georgian window, his hand drawing the curtain open just enough to gaze unseeingly out at the cold horizon. The landscape outside was bathed in white, the sky washed by hazed-over sun, the ground wet and thick with snow. It seemed so bright, so limitless—and so close—and yet compared to the dark study, with its curtains drawn in darkness and its candle flames flickering, it seemed to Draco like another world entirely.
