The Girl Who Hid | ✓

|146| Inlove

I heard the screams and yells of my friends without a hope of knowing what had happened to them —

"Protego!" I cried with great power. I prayed the protection would suffice for them.

And then the world resolved itself into pain and semi-darkness: I was half buried in the wreckage of a corridor that had been subjected to a terrible attack covered under something heavy. Cold air told me that the side of the castle had been blown away, and hot stickiness on my cheek told him that I was bleeding copiously. I tried to stand up, but I couldn't, I was trapped.

"Help!" I cried. "HELP ME!"

Trashing under the weight of—

"FRED!" I shouted even louder. Fred was thrown across my body, not moving. "HELP ME, PLEASE," I choked.

A hand reached out to me and I grabbed their wrist, trying to pull myself out from under the rubble and Fred. Percy and Ron came over, identifiable by their red hair, and turned Fred over, allowing me to get up.

With every step I took, I swayed. Hermione was also struggling to her feet in the wreckage a few feet away.

"Fred," I shouted, shaking him. His eyes were closed and blood was pouring from his temple, dust covering his body.

"Maisey—"

"Fred!" I shook his harder, cutting off Harry's cries. "Fred, please!"

I rubbed the blood off his face as tears fell down my face, I can't lose him. I left him so I wouldn't hurt him...

"Please don't leave me," I sobbed, shaking him more.

Nothing.

"Fred! Wake up!" I grew angry. This wasn't a funny prank anymore. In the middle of a war, playing jokes. Pretending... to be dead...

"Fred Weasley!" I shouted, angrily. "Please! This isn't funny."

"Maisey," Harry said softly.

"No!" I looked up at him through blurry eyes. "He's not—" I looked back down at him, "Fred, please, don't leave me..."

Nothing, only the sound of distant cries and war.

"Fred, please, I love you," I whispered, crying into his chest.

I heard a small exhale and quickly shot up from his chest to see a slight, pained smile play on his lips.

"I love you too, Mousey," he croaked.

"You bastard! I thought you had died, why didn't you answer—"

But I was cut off as a body fell past the hole blown into the side of the school, and curses flew in at us from the darkness, hitting the wall behind our heads.

"Get down!" Harry shouted as more curses flew through the night: He and Ron pulled Hermione and me to the floor and Percy jumped down as well. Fred rolled out from his spot and crawled to his discarded wand.

"We've got to—" Instead of finishing my sentence, I let out a loud scream. A monstrous spider the size of a small car was trying to climb through the huge hole in the wall: One of Aragog's descendants had joined the fight.

Ron and Harry shouted together; their spells collided and the monster was blown backward, its legs jerking horribly, and vanished into the darkness.

"It brought friends!" Harry called to us, glancing over the edge of the castle through the hole in the wall the curses had blasted: More giant spiders were climbing the side of the building, liberated from the Forbidden Forest, into which the Death Eaters must have penetrated. All of us fired Stunning Spells down upon them, knocking the lead monster into its fellows, so that they rolled back down the building and out of sight. Then more curses came soaring over my head, so close I felt the force of them blow my hair.