Chapter Text
The Gryffindor common room was very quiet, but Hermione didn't mind at all — in fact it was exactly what she was looking for. She'd claimed the burgundy leather armchair closest to the fire and tucked herself into it with a book on defensive spells, not for coursework, though technically she was still a seventh-year student. Technically. That word felt almost funny now. In the middle of March, the war had spilled inside the castle walls, and the word "student" had stopped meaning much of anything.
It wasn't even a month into the conflict and she already felt changed. She was convinced, in some quiet and certain part of herself, that she would never feel truly happy again. She tried, as she sometimes did, to picture her parents' kitchen on a Sunday morning — her mother's terrible singing, the smell of burnt toast — and found the image there but hollow, like a room with all the furniture removed. She'd gotten good at letting those thoughts pass without chasing them.
Harry and Ron, at this very moment, were probably up in the dormitory, hunched over maps and half-finished notes the way they'd taken to doing most evenings. She hadn't been invited, or maybe she had and she'd preferred this — she wasn't entirely sure anymore. Either way she was here, and the fire was warm, and the book was useful, and that was enough.
She watched Ginny across the room, tongue between her teeth, carefully painting her nails, and wondered when she herself had last done something so deliberately pointless — and then immediately felt ashamed for wanting to — as if even that small softness was something she could no longer afford.
She was still staring at Ginny's hands when the portrait hole burst open. Neville nearly tripped over himself coming through it, his face pale and streaked with something dark she didn't want to identify.
"They're here," he said, and the way he said it — quiet suddenly, almost calm — was somehow worse than if he'd screamed. "I saw them from the Astronomy Tower, coming across the grounds." He paused, and when his eyes met hers they were wide and dark in a way she had never seen on Neville before, stripped of everything except fear. "Hundreds of them. Hermione, you need to contact the Order, now, we can't—" he stopped. "We can't hold them."
Hermione was already on her feet. "Ginny — find Harry and Ron, now, don't stop for anything." She turned to Neville, wand out, mind running three steps ahead the way it always did when she was frightened. "You — get everyone who can fight to the corridors. I'll contact the Order."
Her voice sounded steadier than she felt. She needed to be the composed one — she always was, that was her part — but underneath it her mind was running cold. Voldemort's army had never marched in numbers like this before. Whatever was coming tonight was different. Whatever was coming tonight was worse.
She took a breath, steadied her wand, and cast. The silver phoenix burst from the tip in a stream of light, blazing brighter than it had any right to be in the dimness of the common room — she hadn't even thought to find a quiet room, there was no time for that, there was no time for anything — and she pushed every word she needed into it, her voice low and urgent: "Hogwarts is under attack. We need the Order here now." The phoenix held the words for just a moment, its wings spreading wide and luminous, before it slipped through the window like smoke and vanished into the night.
The corridor outside the Great Hall was barely recognizable. Torchlight flickered against the stone walls, casting long shadows over the faces of people she knew — people she loved — and some she hadn't expected to see at all. Harry found her first, his hand closing around her arm before she'd even spotted him in the crowd.
Ron appeared at her other side, pale but steady, his jaw set in that particular way that meant he was frightened and refusing to show it. Neville was already talking to McGonagall, whose expression was carved from stone — composed, unreadable, terrifying in its calm.
Her eyes moved through the crowd almost involuntarily, the way they always did lately, until they found Cedric Diggory at the far wall. He was already looking at her. He gave her a small nod — steady, certain, the way he always was — and she waited for the feeling that usually followed. It didn't come. Just the torchlight, and the noise, and the cold stone under her feet.
Then the doors at the end of the corridor burst open and Sirius came through at a near run, the Order filing in behind him like a wave. His eyes found Harry immediately across the crowd — just a second, just a look — and something in Hermione's chest that had been wound very tight since Neville had crashed through the common room door finally, briefly, loosened.
"Alright," McGonagall said, and the corridor went quiet. "Listen carefully. We will not get a second chance at this."
The first spell hit before she'd finished speaking.
The Great Hall became a battlefield in seconds. Spells cut through the air like lightning, green and red and white, and Hermione moved on instinct — shield, deflect, counter, move — her mind emptied of everything except the next second and the one after that. Harry was on her left, Ron on her right, the three of them falling into the rhythm they'd practiced, the one that didn't need words anymore.
It almost worked.
The castle corridors became a maze of smoke and shouting. She stunned a Death Eater she didn't recognize near the staircase, stepped over debris that used to be a suit of armor, ducked a curse that scorched the wall inches from her ear. Outside the windows the grounds were lit up like a terrible dawn — flashes of light, distant screams, the sound of something enormous collapsing.
It was near the entrance hall that she saw the first familiar face.
Pansy Parkinson, maskless, her lip curled — and she was laughing, a sharp, breathless sound, as a spell from somewhere behind her sent a Ravenclaw girl crumpling to the floor at her feet. She didn't even look down.
Theodore Nott stood a few steps back, methodical and quiet, finishing a spell with a small, precise movement of his wand. The boy he'd been aiming at hit the wall and didn't get up. Nott had already moved on before he landed.
Blaise Zabini slipped through the chaos like he was bored by it — stepping neatly aside as a curse meant for him struck someone behind him instead, not even turning to see who it hit.
And then Draco.
He was masked but she knew him anyway — the set of his shoulders, the way he moved, precise and deliberate, nothing wasted. She looked at him for exactly one second and felt nothing she hadn't already expected to feel. Of course he was here. Of course.
She turned back and kept fighting.
She didn't see the spell coming.
It hit somewhere between her and Ron — a concussive blast that wasn't any color at all, just force, just pressure — and the world tilted sideways. When the smoke cleared Harry was gone. Ron was gone. There were faces she didn't recognize pressing forward and she was moving backwards, then sideways, then running, her wand raised, her breathing ragged, the corridor narrowing around her.
She turned a corner and nearly collapsed with relief.
A figure ahead of her in the dark, slight and familiar, the outline of messy hair.
"Harry—"
He didn't answer.
Something in her chest stuttered.
He was standing too still.
The laugh stopped her cold. Low and delighted and completely, horribly wrong.
The figure turned.
"Well, well, well." Bellatrix Lestrange tilted her head, her smile splitting wide like something broken. "If it isn't the golden girl."