#lumosfic

Hermione

August 10, 2003, 9:00 p.m.

Static blitzed through her mind. Shrieking. Pounding.

“Tell me, Hermione. When did it start?” 

There was salt water on her lips. Seeping out of her eyes and ears, clogging her throat and nose.

George watched across the tent, seated and folded over with his elbows on his knees. The band around his arm was burnt like the rest of his fatigues; the rank marking—the General’s rune—scorched away like nothing more than a petty vanity title. Now, his identifier was fire. Was damage. Was smoke.

He had gone right for the kill, blast the consequences.

Carter knelt, interrupting the length of space between them. Narrow eyes, a bouquet of  weathered wrinkles between her brows.

Hermione opened her mouth to reply, and the deep sprayed out with her voice. 

Carter dodged back. It splashed her soaked pyjamas, the tin bucket in her lap. George flinched at the sound of it landing. 

Every particle of her vibrated at a slower rhythm. 

But she managed to speak: “I don’t know,” she said, and her breath was frosted and white, out of place against the heat in the healer’s quarters.

Carter clenched her jaw, reached forward to mop at the mess with a damp towel. “Try.”

Hermione squeezed her eyes shut.

At first, it was flashes of white, and ice through the thick metallic tearing.

Ice fracturing beneath her skates.

Pond water up her nose.

Grey. Black. Wet and red on the ground.

Screams shaking the cobblestones and windows breaking in shopfronts. Barn owls dying in their cages, bricks whipping past her head like bits of hail.

Bodies thumping to the ground.

Clanging.

“Hermione.” Carter leaned in.

Hermione opened her eyes, looked up at the floating lantern jar. The rays bent and undulated, as if there were fathoms of ocean over her head, between them. 

Outside the tent, goblin drums beat songs of war and mourning for an impossible quest come the morrow. And yet George was here, spending these last hours on worry. Behind Carter, his gaze was a tangle of desperation—pleading.

The tears flowed from her eyes in unnatural sheets, the salt in them stinging.

“There was the alley—” she choked.

Yes, it had gotten worse after the alley. Exponentially so. She could admit that, now. Could trace the little signs.

George’s eyes were latched to hers, the intensity in them dizzying.

She blinked.

For a terrifying moment, he was a stranger. 

A man–grizzled, tall, brimming with manic emotion she couldn’t place.

She blinked again.

George. It was George—of course. Of course. And that was fear on his face. “I’ve made it worse,” he said, but he was talking to Carter. “I can’t help her—it’s too—”

Her gaze seemed to lunge, tunnel deeper, and snatches of sound and pain feathered against her consciousness. The sensation of a frigid, wet lump plastered against his chest. Voice shredded from screaming for help. The need to hold on to her—to—please, no—not Hermione—he hadn’t the strength—

Another blink, and her mind slipped from the rush of foreign sensations. George grasped his forehead as he searched her, panting. “No, Darling,” he rasped, face strained. “Not that way.”

Hermione raked in a breath. Only a fraction seemed to find her lungs. “I didn’t mean to—”

What? What was she saying?

“Tell me about Diagon,” Carter pressed. “You’re lost, Hermione. You must find your way back to us. Retrace your steps.”

She would try. Hermione peered at the lantern, gasped through the waters, and reached towards the light.

“It felt like the world was ending,” she said. “Again.”

There was a universe of pain in that word–again. To face the unimaginable requires great courage. But to face such a trial more than once requires great love–for that is the only thing strong enough to keep the feet moving when the head knows what lies before it.