I Learned Your Pulse

"You're Hermione, and always will be."

Hermione struggled and screamed in blind panic, her limbs flailing about uselessly in the water. She could feel the frigid temperature taking its toll. Her fingers and toes were going numb and the hair on the back of her neck was standing straight, even in the waves that circulated around her body, which was slowly shutting down to preserve body heat. She couldn't feel her wand in her hand anymore and that seriously terrified her more than her situation; without the wand in her palm, where it fit perfectly, she felt useless and sure of her death. Her lungs needed air immediately, and they were burning; her struggling limbs were sowly, and without her permission, ceasing to move. And the worst part of her situation was that the claws and the teeth of the Kabbel were slashing at her, cutting her skin and tinting the water around her crimson. She was weakening by the second. She forgot for a moment she was incapable of getting oxygen, and tried to breath in; she gulped large amounts of water, which clawed at the back of her neck.

She tried desperately to fight the being off of her, but it was too strong and too hungry to ignore. She was fighting blindly, inable to see anything past her blood floating around her, inable to feel anything but the swipes of the Kabbel and the stings of the cuts being doused. She was crying now, the tears mixing with the water around her, and then - like a godsend - she felt the familiar wood of her wand in her hand, still warm from when she'd held it last.

She would have sighed a sigh of relief had her lungs not been screaming as she had been. Instead, she used a breath to make the water less cold, as she already couldn't feel anything waist-down. "Calesco," she said, not hearing anything but knowing immediately it had worked, because the sub-zero temperature that had engulfed her had turned a lovely bath-water warm, and the Kabbel was shocked for one second.

"Ascendio," she said, again hearing nothing; but she felt herself being propelled up and out of the water. As soon as her face touched air, she gulped in a great amount of air, opening her eyes and hearing the screams of the crowd. The Kabbel's shriek of fury arose from the depths of the tank as she scuttled herself away from the it, seeing how the water and blood rolled off of her skin and clothes and onto the wooden planks beneath her.

There was a moment of silence from both the crowd and her, and then she vomitted. She vommitted extra blood she hadn't already lost and she vomitted the water she'd taken in instead of air. The crowd gasped as her stomach curled in and around itself, twisting itself in knots and pushing out the minimal breakfast she'd had. The people watching her were revolted, as was she. There she was, having almost died, bleeding and soaking wet and sitting in her own puke. The smell nauseated her, and she held her stomach for a moment, letting herself breathe once more. She looked up. Fluffy was staring at her with three different expression from farther along the wooden planks. One head looked at her as if she had utterly bamboozled him, another looked at her suspiciously, and the last looked at her with nuetrality. She was shocked to see that none of the heads were looking at her as if she was food or a threat. But she was dizzy and had to resist the urge to lie down right then and let herself sleep.

She stood.

"Fluffy?" she asked, barely making a sound, her throat too scratched from the water to make much noise.

The dog cotninued to stare at her, sitting on its haunches.

She took a step forward.

Fluffy didn't move.

She took another step and her left knee, which she'd been leaning on, gave out. She toppled forward, directly in front of the dog, earning nothing but more blood-seeping gashes from the rough splinters and crude nailwork. Her forehead hit the board hard and she was dazed for a few moments, laying there, and to the crowd, it looked as if she had died.