I Learned Your Pulse

"Out of the way!"

Draco and Hermione stood just outside the door to the girls' bathroom, having narrowly escaped Myrtle's insistent whining about how everyone was wrecking her afterlife. The doors ahd shut behind them, and Draco almost wished he and Hermione were back inside it. Just at his feet, so close he nearly walked into it, was the body of Lavender Brown, her bouncy curls flung uselessly over the wounds in her face, staining them crimson. There were bodies scattered here and there along the ground of the hall, but it was deserted, other than that. His stomach churned when Hermione placed a hand over her mouth and tears welled in her eyes again, but he couldn't comfort her. Not when he was so close to crying himself. Both of them had theirs wands out, and they kept them poised in front of themselves. Hermione's chocolate eyes grew darker as she saw that one of the bodies not stirring couldn't be any older than eleven, and her eyebrows sagged as they do when she's about to cry. Draco squeezed the hand he was holding gently, and felt her squeeze back.

There were walls blown down and the statues were all off their posts. The debris on the ground covered the sights of the bloodless and the injured, and Draco couldn't make out who was alive and who wasn't. Or maybe they were all dead. It seemed only five or six bodies were in the hallway, so maybe someone had picked them up... if the fight was over. If not, it was awfully quiet, and the fighting had to be somewhere else...

"Come on," he whispered, taking a couple steps forward and rounding the corner. She followed him like a shadow, dark, brooding and not always there, though sometimes he wished she could be. He saw that this hallway, too, was littered with children, teens and adults alike, all who'd come to learn or to support Hermione - all who'd come to live.

And then the faintest sound of a million voices sobbing began to float towards them through the air, ringing of the pain and merciless battle that had wrung itself out over the castle.

"It's awful," she said, her voice quavering.

Draco made no response, but continued to pull her along, ready for anything to pop out. But, after a while of following the cries through the lifeless corridors, he lowered his wand a bit. The weeping grew louder by the second, and Draco could just make out a voice he'd learned to hate. Kingsley was trying to call order, and Draco seethed. You weren't supposed to call order to a room full of grieving friends and family. You were supposed to let them grieve. The doors of the Great hall loomed up in his vision, and he listened for a moment, deciding whether or not to go in. And the he heard Mrs. Weasley's voice, heaving tears too great to bear, saying, over and over, "My daughter, not my only daughter, no, not my daughter, no, no..."

Hermione had heard this too, and with a gasp that left him remembering how she'd screamed Harry's name when he'd been pronounced dead by Voldemort, she pushed through the doors.

Heads turned and people began gossipping in whispers immediately. But Hermione had eyes for only one person - the red-head as she lay on the ground, surrounded by her Irish-looking family. She lay on a matt, like all the other wounded in the room, and he knew that they had cleared the halls of the wounded. There were at least two hundred injured people, lying and being tended by a flustered and tear-stained Madame Pomfrey. The tables were gone and debris was piled in corners, and people sat about, crying and comforting. Draco's eyes, like Hermione's, were drawn to the completely still Weaslette on the floor. He couldn't see her chest rise and fall, and Harry, clutching her hand like a life-line next to her, seemed to be so pale he was a ghost, and his glasses were askew once more. Ron, behind him, was standing with his back to the crowd of his family and best friend, staring at his hands as he clasped them, his knuckles white, as if squeezing them would bring her back. But was she dead at all? If she had been, wouldn't they haveleft her in the hallway?

Harry's green eyes rose from his fiancee and spotted them.

"She won't wake up," he said, his voice clear, but not flat, breaking twice and thick with emotion.