They arrived beneath a blackened sky, the moon their only witness—a cold, watchful eye that pierced the canopy in fractured beams, casting pale, unnatural light across the forest floor. The trees loomed like skeletal sentinels, their twisted limbs clawing at the heavens, as if trying to snuff out what little light remained. The air was thick, stagnant, pressing against their lungs like something alive. No wind. No sound. Only the rhythmic crunch of dried leaves beneath cautious steps, each one impossibly loud in the suffocating silence.
Their wands glowed dimly, flickering like dying stars in a sea of shadow, and for all the light they offered, it felt as though the darkness was swallowing it whole, inch by inch. The path ahead was narrow and winding, the kind that twisted without logic—like the forest had rearranged itself to confuse and contain them.
Pansy's grip on Neville's hand had turned iron-tight, her nails cutting crescents into his skin. But he didn't flinch. He said nothing. The tremor that ran through her palm told him everything—this wasn't just fear. It was dread, deep and primal, the kind that blooms in the gut when something is profoundly wrong.
"Something's here," she breathed, her voice thinner than mist, barely audible above their footsteps. "Something bad."
Neville swallowed hard, the chill of her words settling into his bones like frost. But he'd already felt it too—the way the air clung too closely, the way the shadows pressed inward like they were listening. "I know," he whispered. His free hand hovered over his wand, twitching toward it like muscle memory. "It's like the forest is holding its breath."
At the front of the group, Luna walked without pause.
Her pale hair caught the moonlight in odd flickers, making her look half ghost, half goddess—an ethereal silhouette slipping silently through the trees. But there was nothing soft about her now. The dreaminess she once carried like a second skin was gone. Burned away. In its place was something harder. Something old. She moved with a purpose that teetered on the edge of desperation, her strides too quick, too sharp. It was as though she believed sheer force of will could rip back the veil between her and Theo.
She had become a specter of resolve—beautiful and terrifying.
And still, beneath her breath, she whispered.
A mantra. A hymn. A spell.
"I will send out an army to find you," she murmured, her voice thin but cutting through the thick air like a thread of silver. "In the middle of the darkest night, I will rescue you. I will never stop marching to reach you…"
Her words rippled out like ripples on a cursed pond, quiet yet heavy, drawing the others behind her as if bound by invisible thread. It was more than a promise. It was defiance. It was mourning dressed in armor.
Behind her, the others moved in silence, every breath shallow, every footstep deliberate. The deeper they went, the more it felt like the forest wasn't just watching—it was waiting.
And still Luna walked, whispering her vow to the shadows.
The haunting rhythm of her vow was the only sound that accompanied their tense journey, echoing in the hearts of those who followed her. Each word was a reminder of her unwavering love and her refusal to yield to despair. Luna Lovegood was no longer the gentle, whimsical woman they all knew; she was a force of nature, a beacon of relentless hope burning.
Ginny, who had been trailing just behind Luna, came to an abrupt halt mid-step. Her breath hitched. Her nose wrinkled sharply, and she lifted a hand to her face, eyes narrowing as the first tendrils of something wrong slithered into her senses.
She turned slowly, her voice tight and brittle as glass. "Do you smell that?" she asked, though the answer was already written across every face.
The question cut through the silence like a knife, and in its wake came nothing but stillness—thick and choking. The others had smelled it, too. They just hadn't dared speak it aloud.
It was metallic. Sharp. Wet.
Thick as blood, heavy as rust.
It curled low to the ground, clinging to the damp earth and rotting leaves, seeping into their clothes, their throats, their lungs. It wasn't just a smell—it was presence. Something saturated the forest around them.
A living thing had died here.
Many of them.
Ginny's hand went to her wand without thought, her fingers trembling as she tightened her grip.
Neville swallowed audibly.
The air was suddenly too still.
And then, all at once, the group answered—each voice hushed, unwilling to disturb the weight of it.
"Death."
The word hung there like a specter. A curse. A truth.
And death it was.
As they rounded the next bend, the trees thinned—and the sight that met them tore a gasp from their throats.
They froze.
The gallows rose before them like a grotesque monument to savagery, its skeletal frame assembled from jagged iron and rusted wood, each mismatched section fused together in a crude display of violence masquerading as structure. It was not just a place for execution—it was meant to haunt, to display suffering as spectacle. The ropes hung low, swinging gently in the stale breeze, their nooses coiled like vipers waiting to strike again. There was no pretense of mercy here, no illusion of formality; this was a place built for terror, and every inch of it reeked of cruelty.
The smell, thick and putrid, hit Hermione with the force of a curse, tearing through her senses with merciless precision. Her stomach turned violently, bile rising in her throat, her vision doubling as tears sprang unbidden to her eyes. The stench of blood, sweat, decay—it invaded her mouth, her skin, her mind. Her legs threatened to give out beneath her as the sight registered fully—bodies hanging limp, faces obscured, the grotesque sway of death moving in rhythm with the forest's stillness. Her fingers, clammy and trembling, found Draco's arm and clung to it with desperation, her nails digging into the fabric of his robes as she choked out a sound—half-formed words, half-sob.
"I—I can't…" she gasped, her voice barely audible over the roar in her ears. "Draco—"
Without hesitation, his hand moved to the small of her back, grounding her, holding her firm against the rising tide of horror that threatened to drown her. His voice cut through her panic, firm and focused, not harsh but unyielding in its steadiness. "Look at me," he said, his tone threaded with urgency and quiet strength, the sound of it like a tether pulling her back from the edge. "Breathe. Focus on me. Just me. Right here."
His eyes held hers, pale and unwavering, and she held on to him like a lifeline, her shaking breaths slowly—painfully—starting to steady, drawn in rhythm to the calming cadence of his voice, though her body still trembled as if it knew something her mind couldn't yet bear to accept.
But even as Hermione's breath began to even out, Neville's attention shifted sharply. His gaze moved past the gallows, past the row of silent corpses, and narrowed on a darker shape approaching along the far path—something moving, dragging, alive. He reacted instantly, turning toward Pansy without thought, his hands gripping her shoulders with an intensity that startled even her.
"Get down," he said, his voice low but fierce, not a request but a command forged from terror. "Lie flat on the ground. Don't argue. Don't look. Don't move until I come back for you."
She stared at him, startled and confused, but the look in his eyes—the sheer fear buried in the steel of his expression—left no room for protest.
And then her gaze followed his.
The moment her eyes registered the shapes emerging from the gloom, everything inside her shattered. Time collapsed into sound—raw, piercing, inescapable sound—as a scream tore from her throat, wild and unrestrained, ripped from a place deeper than fear, deeper than rage. It was a sound born of recognition—the kind of scream that only came when love and horror collided at full force.
Two figures, dragged mercilessly across the clearing, their bodies limp, bloodied, barely clinging to form. Their faces were swollen and broken, shadows concealing the worst of it, but not enough—not enough to mask who they were. Not enough to protect her from the truth.
Even battered and half-unconscious, even with their heads bowed and limbs trailing uselessly across the dirt, she knew them.
Her breath caught violently in her chest, and she fell to her knees without knowing she had moved, her hand pressed to her mouth, her other clawing into the ground as if anchoring herself to the earth might keep her from crumbling completely.
°°°
Ginny surged forward as if pulled by some invisible force, the ground beneath her feet blistering with heat—not metaphorical, but real, scorched and pulsing with a raw magic that seared through the soles of her boots and licked at her skin. Each step forward felt like walking through fire, the path before her alight with something ancient and furious, something that responded to the white-hot rage rising in her chest like a tide that refused to recede. The pain didn't slow her—it fueled her. Her pulse pounded in her ears, drowning out everything except the distant, labored groans of the men she loved being dragged toward death.
Draco and Titus exchanged a single, loaded glance—a look honed by war and blood and things they didn't speak of—and vanished together with twin cracks of displaced air, their Apparition muffled by decades of practiced silence. They reappeared in unison at the base of the towering metal structure, their movements smooth and precise, predators slipping into place. The gallows loomed above them like a beast made of steel and shadow, and yet it was the executioners—two masked figures tightening ropes around bruised throats—who seemed suddenly vulnerable.
There was no sound of warning. No shouted spell or dramatic flourish.
Draco moved with the cold efficiency that only someone forged in darkness could manage, his wand cutting the air with a brutal snap as he cast a curse that sent the first executioner hurtling backward. The man slammed into the metal beam behind him, his spine cracking audibly, his body crumpling to the ground in a heap of shattered bone and convulsing limbs. Draco didn't flinch. He didn't pause. He simply turned, already moving toward the next target as though nothing human had just broken at his feet.
Titus chose blood over magic, his wand forgotten in favor of a silver blade that gleamed like moonlight before it disappeared into the neck of the second man. He approached from behind, silent as death, and in one smooth, practiced motion, drew the blade clean across the throat. The man jerked once, a spray of red misting the air, and then collapsed forward, gurgling into silence. Titus let the body fall without ceremony. His eyes were fixed upward, already searching for the ropes that bound Theo and Blaise, already calculating how to get them down.
There was no attempt to be clean. No care for elegance. No mercy. The green light of the Killing Curse would've been too kind, and neither man was in the mood for kindness.
Before either could speak or catch their breath, another crack split the night—and this one did not creep in quietly. Luna appeared like an explosion, her magic roaring around her in waves that rippled through the air and trembled through the earth. Her hair whipped about her face in the sudden wind, eyes wide and wild, her wand raised not as a tool but as a weapon born of fury and desperation.
"GET THEM OFF!" she screamed, and the sound tore through the clearing like thunder, shaking leaves from branches, scattering birds from the trees. It was not the voice of the Luna they had known—the soft-spoken, gentle mystic who whispered to stars and walked like her feet barely touched the ground. This was something else entirely. This was elemental. This was grief transmuted into violence. This was the voice of a woman who had come to reclaim what was hers, no matter what it cost the world around her.
There was no beauty in her now, no quiet strangeness. There was only rage. A mother's rage. A wife's fury. A storm that would not pass until it had drowned every last enemy in its wake.
Without hesitation—without even a flicker of awareness for the eyes that might be watching her, for the horror pooling thickly in the air—Luna hurled herself toward the twisted heap of bodies lying motionless in the blood-streaked dirt.
Her boots skidded across the wet earth as she dropped to her knees beside the corpse, her breath catching in broken gasps that tore through her throat like glass, her fingers trembling violently as they fumbled for the blade tucked beneath the edge of her uniform.
The dagger came free with a sharp whisper of metal, its gleam catching the moonlight just long enough to become something sacred in her shaking hands, something ancient and final and meant to hurt. Her vision blurred, not just from the tears streaking her cheeks, but from the heat behind her eyes, the furious, boiling grief that narrowed the world to a single, pulsing point.
And then she moved.
The first stab landed with a sickening thud, the resistance of flesh collapsing beneath steel as the dagger sank into the dead man's chest. And then again, and again—each strike more violent, more erratic, more unhinged than the last. Her body shook with the effort, her cries broken and wordless as she drove the blade down over and over, the blood rising in splashes that painted her hands, her throat, the sharp ridge of her cheekbones. It mixed with the tears already falling freely down her face, turned her hair dark and heavy at the ends, and stained the air with copper.
Her mouth opened in a scream that didn't even sound human, a sound pulled from some cavern inside her chest where grief had given way to something uncontainable. It wasn't about vengeance, not exactly—it was about the unbearable weight of almost, about how close she'd come to losing him, how fragile it had all been.
She didn't stop—couldn't, wouldn't, because to stop meant acknowledging the storm inside her chest that had been gathering for days, weeks, a lifetime. If she slowed, if she let the blade rest, even for a breath, she would have to feel the unbearable weight pressing down on her ribs, the terror that had calcified behind her eyes, the reality that had hovered just outside reach every moment Theo had been gone.
To stop meant looking up, meant truly seeing what might have been—the rope, the bruises, the stillness in his limbs, the silence in his chest—and there was no part of her that could survive that image, no strength left for the risk of discovering a world where she had been too late. So she kept going, letting the motion carry her through the grief, letting the blood and the sound of impact drown out the thoughts that scraped like knives inside her skull. The violence was the only thing that made sense, the only thing louder than the fear.
It wasn't until arms closed tightly around her from behind—familiar, warm, shaking—that she stilled, breath catching in her throat like a scream that never fully escaped. Hermione's voice, thick with tears and panic, spoke right at her ear, desperate and hoarse, her hands locking over Luna's wrists as if her own heart would stop if she let go. "Luna, stop," she begged, her words cracked and frantic, body straining to hold Luna still even as she sobbed. "Please. They're safe. They're alive. You don't have to do this. Come back. Just—come back to me, come back."
Luna froze, a shudder tearing through her chest so violently she nearly fell forward, the dagger still clenched tight in her trembling hands. For a moment, it seemed she hadn't heard Hermione at all, that she would lunge again, that the grief had eaten her alive—but then the blade slipped from her fingers and dropped into the blood-soaked dirt with a soft, wet clink.
Her hands dropped limply to her thighs, her fingers twitching uselessly, her breath rattling in and out like someone surfacing from drowning. She didn't speak. Couldn't. Her silver eyes—glassy, too wide, unfocused—lifted slowly, unsteadily, toward the gallows where Draco and Titus were now working furiously to cut the ropes, Theo's unconscious body already beginning to sag into Draco's arms, Blaise crumpling into Titus's grip like a man made of glass.
Her lips parted, but no sound came out—only a trembling exhale, a wordless prayer wrapped in disbelief.
And all she could do was watch. All she could do was feel.
Draco worked with brutal efficiency, his jaw clenched so tightly it looked carved from stone, the muscles in his neck pulled taut with strain as he sliced cleanly through the rope coiled around Blaise's neck. The fibers snapped with a sickening tension, and Draco moved instinctively, catching his best friend's collapsing weight before it could strike the blood-soaked ground. Blaise's body was heavy in his arms, far too limp, far too silent. "I've got you, mate," he murmured, voice low and raw, more breath than sound, as if speaking too loudly might shatter the fragile thread of life still clinging to the man in his arms. Blaise's head lolled against his shoulder, his skin the color of ash and streaked with grime and drying blood, but his chest—barely—rose and fell, each breath shallow and ghost-like. He was alive. For now.
Nearby, Titus mirrored his movements with grim precision, his hands slick with blood and rope fibers as he cradled Theo's body down from the gallows. Theo's weight sagged heavily against him, his head lolling at an unnatural angle, face swollen and nearly unrecognizable beneath layers of bruising and dried blood. His lips were tinged with blue, his pulse fluttering erratically beneath skin that felt too cold. He didn't flinch, didn't breathe. He lowered him gently onto the forest floor like he was something sacred, his fingers trembling as they brushed a matted curl from Theo's forehead. "Stay with me, Nott," he whispered, the words cracked and barely audible. "Don't make me bury you."
Then came the flash—sudden and searing—Ginny bursting through the line of trees, her wand blazing like a comet in the darkness. Her magic pulsed with such heat that the air shimmered around her, the ground beneath her boots smoldering with each step, her arrival less like a sprint and more like an eruption. She reached Blaise in seconds, collapsing to her knees beside him, her hands hovering, shaking, terrified to touch him and yet unable to stop. Her breath hitched, and her voice broke with it as she leaned close, brushing her fingers over his blood-matted curls. "Blaise," she breathed, barely more than a sob. "I'm here. I'm here, my love. Please…"
Neville appeared moments later, his arrival quiet but precise, the calm at the eye of the storm. He knelt beside Theo without a word, his wand already in motion, glowing with soft pulses of diagnostic enchantments that danced over both bodies. The eerie light flickered over their battered forms, casting shadows on the torn skin and sunken eyes, the jagged angles of pain etched into every limb. His brows furrowed deeper with each scan, lips moving in a steady stream of incantations and muttered calculations, his focus unshakable even as blood soaked into his knees.
"They're alive," he finally said, though there was no triumph in his tone—only grim urgency. "Barely. Theo's pulse is faint, and Blaise—" he paused, glancing toward Ginny, who was now clutching Blaise's limp hand with both of hers, her tears falling freely onto his skin—"he's losing blood fast. We have minutes. Maybe."
Ginny shook her head violently, as if denial could undo the damage. Her fists clenched at her sides, nails cutting deep crescents into her palms. She turned to Neville with a look of unfiltered desperation, her voice shaking and fierce all at once. "Then do something," she pleaded, her tone cracking with grief. "Please, Neville. You have to save him."
"I will," he replied without hesitation, his voice quiet but resolute as he placed a firm hand on her shoulder. "But not here. Not like this. We need to move now."
Draco, still holding Blaise against his chest, lifted his gaze. His voice was hard, clipped. "Luna. Hermione. Ginny. Get Pansy and the children out. Apparate back to the safehouse. We'll bring them separately—Theo and Blaise need stabilization before we risk transporting them."
But Ginny didn't move. Her eyes burned like coals as she tightened her grip on Blaise's hand, as though by sheer will she could force him to remain tethered to her. "No," she said, her voice flat and sharp as tempered steel. "I'm not leaving. Not him."
"Ginny—" Draco began, but the look she gave him was enough to stop the world.
"I said no," she snarled, the air around her flaring with magic, the leaves at her feet curling inward from the sudden rise in heat. "I am not leaving him."
There was a pause—brief but heavy—and then Draco nodded once, tight-lipped. "Fine. But you stay clear of Neville. Don't get in his way."
The group moved as one, a blur of motion and spellwork, their hands slick with blood and mud, their eyes hard with focus. Every movement was calculated, desperate, necessary. The forest still watched, silent and unblinking, the lingering echo of violence hanging in the branches above like smoke.
Behind them, the corpses of the executioners lay twisted and forgotten at the base of the gallows, their eyes staring into nothing, their limbs splayed at odd angles. The blood pooled thick and black beneath them, soaking into the roots of the trees like an offering. The forest would remember what had been done here—but the battle to pull Blaise and Theo back from death had only just begun.
~~~~~~
The safe house was no longer a place of stillness; it pulsed with frantic life the moment they arrived, its walls thrumming with the rush of magic and panic, the very air seeming to tighten around them like a vice. The wards flared briefly as the group crossed the threshold, crackling with the residue of their flight, and then closed again behind them with a low, thunderous hum. Inside, the atmosphere shifted, the tension settling in thick and suffocating, draping itself across every surface, every breath, every glance exchanged. The unspoken fear was palpable—hovering like stormclouds too heavy to release rain, waiting instead to break in other, quieter ways. No one dared to exhale fully, as if doing so might invite collapse.
Pansy moved first, adrenaline her only fuel now, her body caught somewhere between urgency and numbness. There was no hesitation. Her thoughts came in jagged flashes—blood, Luna, hands shaking, don't drop anything, don't fall apart—but her hands themselves were eerily steady, guided by muscle memory and something fierce coiled at the base of her spine. She flicked her wand sharply, and a bucket materialized in a corner with a quiet snap of displaced air. The water that filled it was cool, clean, but somehow even the sight of it made her nauseous, as though it mocked how little she could really cleanse from what had just happened. Her heart thudded loud in her chest, a drumbeat of panic that refused to settle, but she forced herself to push past it, to do what needed doing.
She turned on her heel and yanked open the supply cabinet with more force than necessary, snatching the cleanest towel she could find and immediately plunging it into the water, her jaw clenched as she wrung it out with trembling fingers. Without waiting, without asking permission, she dropped to her knees in front of Luna and brought the damp cloth to her face. Blood had dried in streaks down her cheeks, caked into the hollows of her throat, spattered like war paint across her collarbones. Dirt clung to her lashes. Her usually serene expression was absent, replaced by the blank, unblinking stare of someone who had seen too much and was still somewhere else entirely.
Pansy pressed the cloth to her skin with as much gentleness as she could manage, though her own breathing was shallow now, forced and uneven. Luna flinched under the touch, her shoulders jerking slightly, and Pansy stilled for a heartbeat before continuing, more carefully this time. Her hand tightened reflexively, her fingers digging into the towel, not out of anger but out of a desperation she didn't yet have the words for. She needed to clean her. She needed to see Luna's face beneath the blood. She needed to do something , because if Luna wasn't okay—if she fractured completely—Pansy wasn't entirely sure what would be left of herself on the other side.
The towel turned red almost immediately, the water bleeding from it in thin crimson rivulets that slid down Luna's jaw and soaked into Pansy's sleeves. She didn't react. She only conjured another, her wand twitching slightly as the spell activated, her eyes never leaving Luna's face. The soiled cloth was tossed aside without ceremony, joining the growing pile of ruined fabric at her knees.
Again, she wiped.
Again, the white towel stained, the color blooming like ink spreading through paper.
And again.
And again.
She scrubbed as if repetition alone might undo reality—as if by wiping the blood away over and over again, she could erase what had happened in the clearing, could banish the image of rope against throat and limbs that dangled too still in the moonlight. Each pass of the cloth was more frantic than the last, not cleansing so much as begging , trying to pull Luna back from whatever ghost-filled place her mind had fled to. The silence between them pulsed with dread, and though Pansy's movements were swift and practiced, the tremble in her off-hand betrayed her—tiny, betraying shudders that crept into her bones and wouldn't stop.
"Luna," she said suddenly, sharply, her voice slicing through the heavy air like a blade against flesh, unforgiving and edged in panic. "We need to prep for an operation. Now. "
Something flickered behind Luna's glassy gaze, and she turned with a speed that was almost inhuman, her blood-smeared face unreadable but suddenly aware . "We need the medical room prepped in sixty seconds," she said, her tone devoid of anything soft, her voice clipped and edged in iron. It was not the dreamy cadence of the woman who once spoke to shadows and starlight. This was not the Luna who made madness sound like poetry. This Luna stood at the edge of a battlefield in her bloodied boots, looking war in the eye without blinking. "Hermione, sterilize the equipment. Pansy, I need every healing draught, sorted by potency and use. We need Blood-Replenishing Potions in bulk , and don't stop until you've found everything. "
The commands cracked through the air like thunder, and in their wake came movement—instinctive, immediate, almost violent in its urgency.
Pansy didn't walk. She ran , bolting toward the storage cabinets with the speed of someone whose entire future was bleeding out two rooms away. Her breath came in shallow, panicked bursts, but she barely felt it—barely felt anything as she tore open drawers and flung them wide, her fingers yanking vials off shelves in a blur of motion that was more survival reflex than thought. The clinking of glass filled the room, rapid and discordant, echoing like bones rattling in a crypt. Her hands trembled harder now, the weight of what could be slipping through her fingers with every second that passed too loud, too sharp, too real .
"Blood Replenishing Potion… Wiggenweld… Essence of Dittany," she chanted under her breath, not calmly, not methodically, but like a woman holding off madness with the sound of her own voice. She lined them up in harsh, regimented rows, color-coded and alphabetized out of necessity, not control—because one slip, one delay, one wrong bottle , and someone they loved might never wake again.
Just across the wall, Hermione worked with a ferocity that bordered on feverish. Her wand sliced the air in precise, brutal arcs, each sterilization spell sparking violently as it collided with metal and stone, her incantations muttered with the rhythm of someone reciting scripture before a storm.
"Scourgify. Purifico. Reparo."
Again. And again. And again.
She repeated the words like a mantra, not because she needed to—but because if she stopped speaking them, if she let her mind drift even for a second, it would land squarely on the image she couldn't unsee: Draco, blood in his mouth, his skin grey and cooling, lying still on a cursed floor while everything inside her screamed . Her hands were steady, but her thoughts were unraveling, fraying at the seams with every blink.
And all around them, the safehouse pulsed like a living thing—magic crackling along the walls, air thick with blood and spells and fear, the scent of iron and fire and skin still lingering. This was not a home anymore.
It was a trauma ward.
The metallic tang of blood still hung in the air, clinging to the stone walls like a curse. It was faint now, diluted by distance and adrenaline, but it lingered just enough to twist Hermione's stomach into knots. It coated the back of her throat with a coppery film, haunted the edges of her senses like a memory that refused to fade. She could taste it with every breath, could feel it woven into the fibers of her robes, like it had soaked into her skin. The surgical instruments gleamed on the counter, rows of them lined with sterile precision, their sharp edges catching the candlelight and throwing tiny flashes against the walls. They looked too clean. Too polished. As though they hadn't been used to cut flesh before. But Hermione knew better. They didn't wait passively—they anticipated , like executioner's blades, hungry for the moment their work would begin.
Luna stood in the doorway like the eye of a hurricane, eerily calm in the center of chaos, the flickering light casting long shadows across her blood-smeared face. Her presence was quiet but commanding, her posture rigid, her gaze sweeping the room with methodical intent. She saw everything—every crack in the routine, every heartbeat slightly too fast. She wasn't cold, but she was clinical, stripped of softness now, as though she had shed it like skin in the clearing.
"Pansy," she said, voice like steel wrapped in silk, "check the expiration on the Blood-Replenishing Potion. It has to be fresh."
"Already done," Pansy shot back from across the room, not turning from the table where she stood sorting vials with ruthless efficiency. Her voice was sharp, short, the edge of it fraying under the weight of her pulse hammering in her ears. Her hands moved faster than her thoughts, as if if she paused too long she might be crushed by the weight of the stillness pressing in from all sides.
Luna's eyes shifted. "Hermione. Towels. Gauze. Third cabinet—go."
Hermione was already moving before the command was finished, yanking the doors open with a violent tug, the rusted hinges screeching in protest. She ripped the supplies free, the sound of tearing fabric splitting the silence like a scream muffled beneath layers of stone. Her hands shook, but she kept moving, stuffing gauze into a basin, pressing towels against her chest as if they might keep her anchored. "How bad is it going to be?" she asked, her voice breathless, brittle, as though she already knew the answer but couldn't bear the silence that would follow if she didn't speak.
Luna didn't answer at first. Her fingers ran absently over the towel in her hand, slow and repetitive, the tension in her grip tightening until the fabric twisted beneath her palms. She stared through it, like she could already see the blood that would soon soak through. When she finally spoke, the word was soft, but it hit like a hammer. "Bad."
The simplicity of it made it worse.
No comfort. No euphemism. Just truth.
Her eyes flicked up, not to meet anyone's gaze, but to the empty space in the center of the room where bodies would soon be laid out—where decisions would be made that couldn't be undone. "We need to be ready for anything," she added, and the way her voice faltered on the last word made Hermione's spine stiffen.
The weight of those words settled across them like a burial shroud, thick and suffocating, draping over their shoulders and winding around their throats. It didn't matter how brightly the room was lit—shadows clung to every corner, and every breath felt just slightly too loud.
Pansy leaned against the wall just outside the operating room, her arms crossed so tightly over her chest they trembled from the strain. The cold stone at her back offered no comfort, only a reminder that this place had seen too much death already. Her fingers tapped out an erratic rhythm against her sleeves as she stared into the flickering torchlight, her jaw clenched, every instinct in her body screaming to move, to act , to do something , but there was nothing more to be done—not yet. Waiting was the worst kind of torment. It was stillness laced with helplessness, and it was eating her alive from the inside.
Across the room, Luna hadn't moved. She stood perfectly still, the bloodstained towel clenched in her fists as if it were the only thing keeping her grounded. Her face was unreadable—blank, severe—but her eyes betrayed her. They shimmered, silver and glassy, wide with fear, with helpless rage, with something that looked too much like prayer. She didn't speak, didn't blink. But her eyes pleaded with whatever gods or ghosts might still be listening not to take him. Not this time.
Hermione paced, her feet dragging slightly with each uneven step as if the air itself had turned heavy. She moved like she couldn't bear stillness, like if she stopped her body, her mind would catch up—and she couldn't allow that. Her fingers curled and uncurled restlessly, the muscles in her jaw twitching with barely restrained emotion. She wanted to scream. She wanted to hex something, destroy something, undo everything. But all she could do was move, count the seconds, and keep her back to the door, because the moment she saw them carried in, broken and unconscious, something inside her would shatter.
Time lost meaning as minutes stretched into something longer, colder, heavier than time. A silence had taken the room, but it wasn't still—it hummed with dread, with magic held just under the skin, with grief that had not yet been permitted to breathe. It was the silence before a scream. The silence before the final blow lands.
The silence before the world ends— or doesn't.
The fragile stillness of the safehouse shattered like glass beneath a boot as the first crack of Apparition tore through the air. It was sharp, violent—too loud in the breathless quiet that had swallowed the house whole. Then came a second. A third. A fourth. The magic reverberated off the stone walls in a series of concussive bursts that sounded like gunfire, each one snapping through the silence with the urgency of catastrophe. It was not the gentle arrival of guests. It was the sound of something arriving from the edge of death.
All three women froze where they stood, as if turned to stone by the noise. Towels fell from Hermione's arms. Pansy's fingers twitched at her sides. Luna's breath caught in her throat.
For one harrowing moment, no one breathed.
It was Luna who moved first, her silver eyes widening in an instant before she took off like a spell had ignited beneath her feet. She moved fast, not with grace but with raw, breathless desperation, her boots skidding slightly as she rounded the corner. Pansy shoved off the wall with so much force she nearly slipped, her heart punching against her ribcage like it was trying to claw its way out. And Hermione—Hermione trembled all over, her limbs slow to respond, as if her body feared what her heart already knew was coming. Her throat tightened around a silent plea— please, let them be alive —as her legs finally remembered how to run.
The hallway stretched before them like a gauntlet, dimly lit by guttering candlelight, the shadows deepening with every step. And then, at the far end, shapes emerged from the darkness.
Draco was the first to appear, stepping through the gloom with the rigid, lethal grace of a man carved from stormclouds. His expression was unreadable, all sharp angles and ice, but it wasn't his face that stopped them in their tracks—it was his arms. In them, cradled like something too precious to be broken but too broken to be precious, was Blaise. His body was limp, heavy, motionless, his head lolling against Draco's shoulder. Blood streaked his jaw, smeared across the corner of his mouth and down his throat like war paint. His eyes were shut. His skin had lost all its warmth. And yet—his chest rose. Barely. But it rose.
Behind him came Titus, broad shoulders bent beneath Theo's sagging weight. The younger man was draped over him like a lifeless doll, one arm dangling at an awkward angle, his robes torn, blood crusted in the creases of his clothing and across the knuckles of one hand. His face, usually composed, was almost unrecognizable—swollen, bruised, pale as wax. A gash ran along his cheekbone. His eyes were open but unfocused, blinking slowly as though waking from a nightmare he couldn't quite shake.
And then, trailing after them, came Neville and Ginny.
Both looked like shadows of themselves. Ginny's hair was wild, her face drawn and ghost-pale, her arms streaked with soot and blood that was not her own. Her eyes were vacant, sunken, like something vital had been scooped out of her chest and left bleeding behind in that clearing. Neville looked older, heavier somehow, as if the act of holding everything together had aged him in minutes instead of years. His clothes were torn at the sleeves, his wand clenched so tightly in his fist his knuckles had gone white.
The room tilted.
For Hermione, the world pitched sideways, her hands reaching out instinctively to grab the doorframe as her knees nearly gave beneath the weight of relief colliding with terror. They were alive. They were alive. But they were broken, battered, half-here and half-gone, and the sight of them like that— her Draco, Ginny's Blaise, Luna's Theo—was enough to make the air feel too thick to breathe.
Something deep in the house groaned—wood settling or magic shifting—but it sounded too much like grief. Too much like the last gasp of something sacred unraveling.
Hermione barely registered her own body in motion, as though her limbs belonged to someone else entirely—some reflexive version of herself that knew what to do while her mind still lagged several seconds behind, stunned by the raw sight of them, the smell of blood, the tremor of magic still clinging to their skin. Her feet moved instinctively, each step heavy and soundless all at once, and before she could think, before her brain could process the devastation unraveling before her, her arms were already wrapping around Ginny, pulling her into the safety of her chest the instant she crossed the threshold. Ginny didn't fall—she folded , crumpling into Hermione like a house collapsing inward, all scaffolding lost, her body trembling so violently that it rattled Hermione down to the bone. And then came the tears, hot and sudden, soaking through the fabric of Hermione's shirt in great shuddering waves, a desperate, wordless sound escaping her that broke open something raw in the space between them.
Hermione held her tighter, her own arms trembling now, one hand curling into the mess of Ginny's hair as she pressed her lips against her friend's temple and whispered something—words that were meant to be comfort, but felt hollow even as they passed through her lips. "It's okay," she murmured, her voice catching around the shape of that lie. "They're here now. They'll be okay." But as she said it, she felt the words fall apart between them, flimsy and thin as ash, dissolving into the heavy air. Please , her mind screamed beneath the quiet, please let that be true , because if it wasn't, if they had only been given their bodies back to lose them again, she didn't know if any of them would survive it.
Across the room, Pansy didn't waste a second on words. Words were too slow. Useless. Dead things. She moved with wild, reckless speed, her boots skidding across the stone floor, her heart hammering with such brutal force that it echoed in her ears like a war drum. The sound of her blood roared louder than thought, louder than reason. She saw Neville and nothing else. And then she was there , crashing into him with the momentum of every fear that had clawed its way through her since the moment Luna screamed his name through the Floo. He barely had time to brace himself before her body hit his, her arms wrapping around his middle so tightly it bordered on painful, her hands fisting into the fabric of his shirt with such desperation that it looked like she was holding herself upright through him alone.
Neville didn't hesitate. He didn't even speak at first. He simply reached for her like he'd been drowning and had finally touched shore, cupping her face with both hands, his fingers slipping into her hair, grounding her, framing her like something sacred. And then he kissed her— not with heat, not with lust, but with the kind of desperate, anchoring need that came only after watching the people you love slip through your fingers. His mouth moved against hers with a shaky kind of reverence, as though he couldn't believe she was real, and her grip on him tightened until her nails dug into his shoulders through the fabric of his robes.
"They're alive," he breathed against her lips when they finally broke apart, his forehead falling against hers, their breath mingling in the scant inches of space between them. "They're alive." The words were thick with disbelief and relief and something unspoken that neither of them could afford to name.
And that's when Pansy broke.
The sob tore out of her like a wound reopening, guttural and high, shaking her entire frame as her arms slipped up around his neck and she buried her face in the curve of his shoulder. "I was so scared, Nevie," she choked, the nickname cracking through her like glass under pressure, her voice a strangled thing barely able to find shape. "I thought—I thought I'd lose you too." She didn't realize how tightly she was holding him until he winced, but she didn't loosen her grip. She couldn't. If she let go, he might disappear, might vanish like a dream, and she couldn't bear that—not now, not ever.
Neville's breath shuddered through his chest as he held her, grounding her with hands that remained impossibly gentle despite the tremors moving through them both. "I know," he whispered, his voice tight and thick, the syllables uneven with the effort of staying calm. "But I'm here. We're all here. And Hermione and Luna—" he turned as he spoke, his gaze landing on Hermione still wrapped around Ginny, both of them locked in a quiet hurricane of grief and relief—"they're going to fix this. We'll get through it. We always do."
But even as he said it, the room didn't lift. The air stayed thick, the silence oppressive. The magic lingering in the atmosphere had the feel of something not yet done. Something unresolved. Because not everyone was speaking. Not everyone had moved .
Draco and Titus still stood in the doorway like statues carved from shadow, unmoving, silent, their bodies rigid with the weight of what they'd carried—not just the men they'd brought home, but the experience itself. The blood was still wet on their clothes. Their hands were stained to the wrist. Their faces were unreadable, but their stillness screamed what their mouths wouldn't yet say. Something had happened out there. Something worse than they were prepared to explain.
Only Ginny saw it—the single tear that carved a slow, glistening path down Draco's cheek, catching the flickering light as it fell, silent and unannounced. No gasp. No sob. Just that one sliver of grief slipping free from a man who, by all rights, was not supposed to break. Because Draco Malfoy didn't cry. He didn't fracture. He didn't bleed where anyone could see it. He wore pain like armor, turned loss into distance, kept his jaw clenched and his spine straight and his silence sharp enough to wound.
But something had shattered.
And in that tear—just one—was the entire weight of it. The horror, the blood, the helplessness of standing beneath that gallows and thinking, for a moment too long, that they were already dead. The images wouldn't stop playing behind his eyes—Blaise's head lolling like a marionette's, Theo's bruised lips parting in shallow, labored breaths, their bodies too still, too cold, too close. Ginny had seen this expression before, once before, when Draco had stood in this very house with Hermione's blood still drying beneath his fingernails, his face white with the terror of nearly losing her. And now, here he was again—his hands stained, his shoulders bowed under a weight no one could help him carry—and this time it was Blaise and Theo lying broken behind him.
She didn't say anything. She couldn't. Because what could be said in the face of a grief that kept repeating itself, over and over, until it became part of your marrow?
How much more can we take?
The thought wasn't a scream. It was a whisper, buried so deep in Ginny's chest it barely formed words. It was a tremor in her bones, a tremble behind her ribs, an ache in the silence between each breath.
Luna's voice, even and unwavering, broke through the heavy quiet like the edge of a scalpel slicing through flesh—not cruelly, but with clinical precision, cutting through grief to reach the necessity beneath it. Calm but unyielding, she stepped forward and reclaimed her role not as the ethereal observer, not as the whimsical woman they all knew from a different lifetime, but as a healer—sharp, grounded, and terrifying in her focus. "Hermione and I will take care of them," she said, each word shaped with clarity and command, "but we need to be sanitized first. We can't afford mistakes. Pansy, go wash up. Neville, stay with Ginny. Keep her steady."
There was no room for protest in her voice, but still, Pansy faltered for half a second, her feet refusing to obey even as her brain screamed logic. She didn't want to move. Didn't want to put even a single breath of space between herself and Theo, not after what she'd seen—after what they'd all almost lost. Her body screamed to stay, to reach for him, to hover and protect and watch . But Neville, still grounded despite the panic behind his eyes, gave her hand one final squeeze before gently uncurling her fingers from his. The motion wasn't forceful, just firm, and for a moment she hated him for it—hated that he was right.
"Go," he said softly, but there was something final in the way he said it, like he was trying to speak belief into her. "We need to let them work."
Her breath caught in her throat, her stomach lurching with a wave of sickness that had nothing to do with blood and everything to do with fear. Still, she nodded—jerkily, almost mechanically—and forced her feet to turn, her body to obey, even as every instinct in her rebelled against the growing distance between her and Theo's motionless form. She had to trust Luna. Had to trust Hermione. Had to believe this wasn't the end.
But Ginny didn't move.
She stood like a statue, frozen not from shock, but from something colder, heavier, more insidious. Her body remained tucked against Neville's side, but her mind was somewhere else entirely. Her eyes—burning and dry, past the point of tears—were locked on Draco with the kind of intensity that could cut stone. She barely heard Neville's quiet reassurances murmured against her ear, the way he pulled her closer like he could physically shield her from what they'd witnessed, from what they might still lose. Because nothing could touch her in that moment. Not warmth. Not reason. Not comfort.
Because she knew that look.
She recognized it too well—too intimately.
It was the look of someone who had returned from the edge, only to realize they hadn't brought everyone back with them. That vacant, haunted stare. That rigid jaw clenched so tight it could shatter teeth. That fragile stillness disguising a soul unraveling quietly beneath the skin. It was the look of a survivor burdened by the weight of breath—of still being here when others might not be.
It was guilt, pure and corrosive.
Not for what he had done, but for what he couldn't do.
And so Ginny, quiet now, no longer sobbing but suspended in the hollow space between devastation and numbness, reached out. Not with desperation. Not with force. But with something softer, more human. A slow, trembling hand extended toward Draco's, her fingers brushing the back of his as if asking permission to make the contact complete.
He didn't pull away.
But he didn't move either.
He simply stood there, unmoving, frozen in the doorway like a relic—his hand resting in hers, barely responding, as if the warmth of touch hadn't reached him yet. And still he stared, eyes unfocused, face expressionless, while the chaos of triage whirled behind him and the woman who had touched his hand tried, wordlessly, to tether him back to the living.
~~~~~~
The moment they stepped into the surgical room, the door thudding shut behind them like the final beat of a war drum, the world seemed to shrink. The outside noise—crying, murmuring, the rattling shuffle of pacing footsteps—vanished behind thick stone and locking charms, leaving only the harsh scent of blood and antiseptic clinging to the cold air, a mix so sharp and acrid it hit the back of Pansy's throat like smoke. The overhead torches flickered low, their flames casting a sickly glow on the white-tiled floor that was already stained with crimson, and for a split second, she faltered, the nausea curling low in her stomach threatening to rise.
But then something shifted—not in the room, but in them.
With no words, no ceremony, the women who entered that room ceased to be wives, or lovers, or friends. They became soldiers, surgeons, healers carved out of trauma and necessity, women who had stood too many times at the intersection of hope and ruin. Their hands, still trembling with fear a heartbeat ago, steadied. Their eyes sharpened. Every breath became deliberate. They had done this before—too many times. And the price of hesitation had always been loss.
On the surgical beds, Theo and Blaise looked more like corpses than men. Their bodies lay still, twisted into unnatural angles that defied peaceful unconsciousness. Deep lacerations carved grotesque paths across their torsos, angry and dark against pallid flesh. The bruises around their throats were blackened, swollen, and unmistakably shaped by rope. Their wrists bore ligature marks, blistered and raw. There was something hollow in the way their limbs hung off the edge of the tables—too limp, too loose, as though life had only recently crawled back into their chests. It wasn't just the blood. It was the silence of their stillness that spoke louder than anything. They hadn't simply been attacked. They had been punished.
Luna moved first, not with softness, but with a chilling kind of efficiency. The etherealness that so often hovered around her was stripped away, leaving behind something steel-forged and terrifying in its purpose. She approached Theo like a surgeon surveying a patient on a battlefield, her eyes scanning his body not with fear but calculation. "We need to work quickly," she said, and her voice, though calm, had lost all its dreamlike edge—it was sharp now, clinical, threaded with grim authority. "They're both critical. Hermione, start stabilizing Blaise—his vitals are tanking. Pansy, Theo's airway is compromised—focus there first. Keep him breathing."
The command hit Pansy like a slap. Her feet moved before her thoughts caught up, knees locking as she dropped beside Theo's bed and forced herself to look, really look, at him—not as her friend, not as someone she had teased a thousand times over drinks, but as a body broken beyond recognition that she had been tasked to bring back. For a breath, she couldn't breathe. Then she pressed a hand over her mouth, gagging against the burn in her throat, forcing it down. She could not lose control. Not here. Not now.
Breathe, Parkinson. Focus. Save him.
With shaking fingers, she grabbed a sterilized cloth and dabbed gently at the dried blood crusted around his lips, his breath hitching weakly against the contact. Her wand moved next, gliding over his chest in smooth, practiced arcs, scanning beneath the bruises and swelling. What she saw made her blood run cold. The diagnostic spell glowed faintly red across his ribcage—multiple fractures, several cracked clean through. There was fluid shimmering in his lungs like dark water, and a faint pulsing of hemorrhagic light told her there was internal bleeding pooling somewhere too deep to reach without intervention.
She blinked hard, tears stinging, then bit down on the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
You do not get to break. Not while he's still breathing.
Hermione, at the adjacent table, was already moving in tandem with Luna's commands. Her hands were coated in healing salve and blood, wand tracing stabilizing charms in rapid succession over Blaise's chest as she murmured incantations under her breath like a prayer, her jaw set, her brows furrowed so deeply it looked like her face had been carved into something ancient. There was no time to process, no space for fear. Only the sound of spellwork, the dull beeping of a monitoring charm, the wet rattle of broken breath clawing through damaged lungs, and the overwhelming, relentless beat of time pressing against their backs.
Failure, in this room, was a death sentence.
Hermione moved with the focused intensity of someone walking a tightrope over fire, each step measured, each motion precise, her hands gliding through the air in swift, controlled arcs as she cast a series of diagnostic spells over Blaise's chest. Her brow was furrowed with concentration, her eyes scanning the glowing threads of magical data that hovered above his unconscious body, translating the tangled patterns into a mental list of injuries too long, too brutal to absorb all at once. "He's lost too much blood," she said tightly, her voice clipped and breathless but unwavering, as if speaking the truth aloud might force the room to stay anchored in reality. "The ligature marks around his neck—deep, overlapping—it wasn't just one attempt. They tried to strangle him. Repeatedly. The swelling along the trachea confirms compression trauma. Bruising to the carotid. Lack of oxygen. There's internal damage—bruised kidneys, minor liver laceration—but I can't address it yet. I need to stabilize his vitals before his heart gives out. He's slipping."
At the table beside her, Luna's hands hovered over Theo's twitching form, her fingers barely brushing the surface of his skin, yet the contact was enough to make his entire body flinch violently, as if even unconsciousness could not spare him from pain. Her expression remained hauntingly calm, but her voice—though soft—carried a gravity that turned every syllable to stone. "Cruciatus exposure," she murmured, eyes narrowing as she tracked the subtle, spasming movements rippling along Theo's arms and legs. "Long-term. Sustained. There are necrotic echoes in the nervous system—residual dark magic, threaded into the muscles like wire. They didn't just cast it once. They kept him in it for hours, over and over again, until the spell wore thin and his nerves cracked open under the weight. If we don't isolate and neutralize the magical residue soon, the damage will be irreversible. He'll lose motor function. Maybe cognition. Maybe worse."
Pansy's mouth moved before her brain could catch up, a guttural curse sliding from her lips, low and venomous, as her grip tightened on the edge of the table. The rage inside her was volcanic—hot, consuming, barely contained. It boiled just beneath the surface of her skin, itching to be released, to find someone to blame, to punish. But there was no time for fury. Not now. Not when Theo—her Theo, her insufferable, brilliant, ridiculous friend who brewed poisons like poetry and made the darkest things somehow bearable—was laid out before her like a body waiting for last rites. She swallowed hard, shoved the fire down into the pit of her stomach, and forced herself to move.
She bent over him with a hand that still trembled ever so slightly and reached out to brush the sweat-soaked curls from his forehead, her fingers lingering for just a moment longer than they should have, needing the contact, needing him to feel that he wasn't alone. "Stay with me, Theo," she whispered, her voice rough, fierce, trembling at the edges. "Don't you dare leave me. We're going to fix this. I don't care what it takes."
As if summoned by the sound of her voice, Theo's body convulsed violently beneath her hand. His back arched off the table, his mouth twisting in a silent cry, and then he began to choke—his lungs rejecting the air like poison, like even the act of breathing had become too painful to endure. Panic gripped Pansy in a chokehold, but her instincts overrode it. She didn't scream. She didn't cry. She moved, fast and brutal, grabbing the nearest flask of powdered bezoar and jamming her fingers inside without measuring, scraping out a pinch and forcing it past Theo's parted lips. "Swallow, damn it," she snapped, her voice breaking as she massaged his throat, coaxing his muscles to respond with the desperation of someone dragging a soul back from the edge. "Come on, Theo. Come on."
He didn't respond. His lips were slack, his eyes fluttering beneath their lids. Her heart slammed against her ribs, loud enough she could feel it in her temples. No. No, no, no. You are not dying on me. I will kill you myself if you try. Her magic began to spark at her fingertips, wild and unchecked, her wand trembling as she turned toward Luna with frantic urgency.
"Luna—his lungs! I need help with his lungs!"
But Luna was already there, already moving, her wand slicing through the air in a series of slow, deliberate gestures that shimmered with unfamiliar complexity. She didn't speak right away—just focused, drawing power from somewhere ancient and intimate. And then a soft silver mist emerged from the tip of her wand, curling and spinning like smoke caught in moonlight, sinking into Theo's chest with a sound like a sigh. The purifying charm—the old one, the dangerous one—slithered into his bloodstream, weaving through his magic like thread pulling a tapestry back into shape. It sought out the corruption, the rot, the lingering fragments of the Cruciatus curse, and began to unspool them, strand by toxic strand.
Theo's chest rose sharply, then stilled, then rose again—this time slower, deeper, steadier.
Pansy collapsed forward slightly, her hands pressed flat to the edge of the table, her breath coming in short, shallow bursts as her eyes tracked the faintest movement in his ribs. He was breathing. Not well. Not safely. But breathing. The first, tenuous sign of his body responding, of his soul deciding—maybe—to stay tethered to this world.
She let out a shaking breath, part sob, part laugh, part war cry.
Across the blood-slicked tiles of the surgical room, Hermione stood hunched over Blaise's unmoving body, her brow beaded with sweat, hands trembling faintly though her movements never faltered. Her wand hovered just above the line of his clavicle, glowing a deep crimson as she channeled a complex transfusion spell, the air around her crackling with the strain of sustained magic. Her other hand rested gently over his sternum, grounding her as she whispered the incantation under her breath like a prayer, sending pulse after pulse of restorative energy surging into his veins, urging his ravaged body to accept the enchanted blood replenisher coursing through him. It wasn't elegant. It was raw, desperate magic, the kind that tore at your own reserves just to give someone else a chance.
His skin, once gray and waxy, had taken on the faintest blush of pink, a fragile wash of color that clung to the hollows of his cheeks like a question not yet answered.
"He's responding," Hermione said, her voice flat with focus, stripped of emotion even as her eyes flickered with the faintest glint of hope. Her hands didn't stop moving, not even for a second. "But his magical core is depleted. I can barely sense it. If he doesn't stabilize soon, he might go into collapse. I don't know how much more his body can take."
"He needs stabilization potions," Luna said sharply, not looking up from Theo as she checked for signs of neurological recovery. "Both of them do. Immediately."
Pansy didn't need to be told twice. She moved fast, legs shaking beneath her as she crossed the room in a sprint, nearly colliding with the edge of the supply cabinet as she flung it open. Her hands trembled as she yanked down bottle after bottle, muttering the labels aloud in a frantic litany. "Dittany. Blood Replenisher. Strengthening Draught. Phoenix Root. Oh fuck, oh fuck—" She caught the right vial at last—bright amber, concentrated, volatile—and practically dove back to Theo's side, her heart pounding so hard it made her vision swim.
She slid a hand beneath his neck, tilting his head gently but firmly, careful not to jostle his fractured ribs. With her other hand, she uncorked the vial and tipped a few precious drops into his mouth, praying his battered throat wouldn't reject the liquid. For a breathless moment, nothing happened.
And then, mercifully, his throat spasmed once—and then again—and he swallowed.
It was weak, involuntary, but it was something, and the gasp that tore from Pansy's chest was half a sob, half a war cry. Her lungs burned. Her eyes stung. But she didn't stop moving. She pressed her forehead to his for a heartbeat and looked up at Luna with wide, desperate eyes.
Luna, who hadn't paused once, gave her a single, sharp nod—just enough to say he's still in the fight. "He's responding," she said, quieter now, her voice frayed around the edges. "He's fighting."
But there was no time to celebrate.
A strangled sound split the room, and Hermione's head jerked up just in time to see Blaise's back arch violently off the table. His mouth opened in a silent scream, and his body twisted as if trying to crawl away from a pain still buried somewhere inside his chest. Hermione reacted instantly, slamming both palms flat against his sternum and summoning a surge of golden light that poured from her wand into his body like liquid sunlight, thick and glowing and terrifying. The light seeped into his skin, spreading down his arms, across his abdomen, into the deep recesses of the damage they couldn't see.
His breath, once a shallow stutter of panicked gasps, began to slow.
One inhale.
Then another.
Deeper. Measured.
Hermione slumped forward, her body folding over his as the tension drained from her limbs all at once, but her hands remained pressed against him, her wand still glowing. "It's working," she whispered hoarsely, almost as if she didn't trust the words. "His heart rate—it's slowing. It's steady."
Silence followed. Not the brittle, fearful kind from earlier—but the suspended hush of a room daring to hope.
And then, as if the spell had passed between them, a ragged groan broke from Theo's lips.
It was low. Guttural. Unmistakably human.
His fingers twitched—barely, but enough for Pansy to see—and then again, curling against the sheets in a clumsy, instinctive attempt to reach for something, anything. Pansy's breath caught in her throat as she grabbed his hand, squeezing hard, her grip fierce and trembling. "You're okay, Nott," she said, voice cracking into a whisper. "You're safe. Do you hear me? You're safe. You're home."
His eyelids fluttered, just enough for a flash of blue to surface. The eyes didn't focus. They didn't see. But they were open, and for now, that was enough.
At the next table, Blaise, still lost in unconsciousness, shifted slightly. His head turned toward Hermione's hand, just a fraction, as though reaching for warmth in a world he hadn't quite returned to yet.
And that, too, was enough.
Luna exhaled a long, shuddering breath, her entire frame sagging for the first time since they entered the room. She braced a hand on the table, her other still gripping her wand, as though her body didn't know how to stop fighting even as the danger receded. "They're not out of the woods," she murmured, her voice quiet and thinned by exhaustion. "But they're going to live."
The words echoed like scripture in the room.
Pansy shut her eyes tightly, pressed Theo's cold, trembling hand to her forehead, and let the tears come—quiet, raw, ugly tears of relief and rage and the lingering trauma of almost. She didn't know if she wanted to laugh or scream or vomit. So she just whispered, brokenly, "Thank Merlin," like it might hold the universe together for one more breath.
Hermione slowly straightened, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her arm, her eyes drifting across both beds—at Blaise's color slowly returning, at Theo's fingers twitching in Pansy's grip. The sight carved something sharp and sacred into her chest. They had done it. Somehow.
Only then did Pansy's knees give out. She collapsed into the nearest chair, her limbs shaking, her hands still curled protectively around Theo's.
Luna sank into the seat beside her, her face pale, streaked with blood and sweat. She reached up and brushed a clump of damp hair from Pansy's forehead, her fingers lingering just long enough to ground them both.
"We did it," Luna whispered, as though saying it too loud might break the fragile spell holding everything together.
Pansy let out a soft, humorless laugh—low, rough, and raw from disuse. "Yeah," she murmured, her voice hollow with disbelief. "Barely."
Across from them, Hermione met Pansy's gaze. Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be. In that shared glance passed something heavier than exhaustion—something rooted in blood and memory, a silent vow forged in survival.
Never again.
Not like this.
Not if they could help it.
~~~~~~~
The moment Blaise stirred—just the faintest flicker of life returning to his exhausted eyes, a barely-there shift in his chest as his lungs dragged in a ragged breath—the air in the room seemed to splinter. The tension, though still thick and pulsing like a second heartbeat beneath the stone floor, fractured just enough to let something else through: the possibility of hope. But Luna didn't wait for confirmation. She didn't glance at Blaise again, didn't pause to acknowledge the murmurs around her or the gasp that someone let slip behind a trembling hand. She ran.
Ran as if pulled by an invisible thread directly to him. Ran past the tables still streaked with blood, past Hermione slumped against the wall trying to catch her breath, past the stench of antiseptic and trauma and scorched magic that lingered in the air like smoke. Her boots slapped the stone once, twice, and then she was there, skidding to her knees at Theo's bedside with a desperation that bordered on reverent hysteria.
And for a moment—just one moment—she couldn't breathe.
He was still. Too still. His skin a sickly shade beneath the golden flicker of the torches. His lashes cast deep shadows on his cheeks, and the bruises that bloomed along his throat, the crusted blood at the corner of his mouth, the lines of torn flesh that marred the angles of his face—they should have broken her. They did break her. But what shattered her more, what undid her entirely, was the rise and fall of his chest. Uneven. Shallow. Labored. But steady.
He was breathing.
He was here.
He was hers .
Her hands trembled violently as she reached for him, not with fear, but with a kind of holy reverence, like she was about to touch something she had prayed for and had dared not believe she would get back. Her fingers cupped his face carefully, as if he might dissolve into mist beneath her palms. She traced the line of his jaw, the hard ridge of his cheekbones, the deep purple bruise that flowered beneath his right eye. Her thumb moved slowly, memorizing the split in his lower lip, the stubble that scraped against her skin, the heat—faint but real—emanating from his temples. Her breathing faltered as she leaned closer, her forehead nearly brushing his, and she drank him in like someone who had crawled across a desert for days and found water only to realize they weren't dreaming.
"Theo," she whispered, and the word cracked like fragile glass in her throat. It wasn't loud. It wasn't panicked. It was barely even sound—just breath and reverence and ache wrapped into one word she had said a thousand times and now feared she'd never be allowed to say again. "Theo…"
His eyelids fluttered at the sound of her voice, and then—slowly, painfully—they opened. Brown, deep and storm-wracked, dull with exhaustion and glazed with pain, but alive. His gaze found hers, and for one agonizing, perfect moment, everything stopped. The burning in her lungs. The roar in her ears. The crush of grief that had held her suspended since the moment she saw the ropes wrapped around his neck. It all disappeared, replaced by the aching silence that stretched between them like an ocean—until he looked at her like that.
With love.
With recognition.
Her lips quivered. Her hands cradled him tighter, thumbs brushing down the sides of his face like she could press him back into wholeness through touch alone. Her tears finally fell—silent, hot, unstoppable. "My Sun," she said, the words trembling as they left her lips, cracked open by everything she hadn't been able to say while he dangled at the edge of death. "My Sun…" It was all she could manage, all she could give him in that moment. Everything else was locked behind the screaming of her soul.
Theo blinked slowly, the smallest movement, and exhaled with a sound that was barely a breath, but still—it was his. A sound that existed in the world again.
And then, with effort that clearly cost him more than she could bear to witness, his hand lifted—shaking, bloodied, fingers twitching until they found her cheek. The touch was featherlight, nothing more than a whisper against her skin, but it sent a bolt of something through her chest so violent it nearly doubled her over.
His lips curved into the ghost of a smile, not wide, not strong, but unmistakable and then, in a voice so raw it felt scraped from the bottom of his lungs, he answered her.
"My Moon," he rasped, and though it was quiet, it cracked the very core of her being open.
It was everything. It was enough. It was him .
Tears pooled in her wide, luminous eyes, threatening to spill over. She had never been a woman prone to fear, but this— this had terrified her in a way she could never put into words. The man she loved more than the universe itself had almost been stolen from her, ripped away before she had the chance to tell him, to remind him of how deeply he was woven into the fabric of her very being.
She let out a breath so ragged it felt like it scraped the inside of her chest raw, a breath that had been caged behind her ribs for hours—days—forever. It trembled out of her as she leaned forward, closing the small, aching space between them, and pressed her forehead against his with a reverence born not of affection, but of survival. She needed the contact—not as comfort, but as proof . Proof that he was real, that his warmth hadn't vanished, that the body beneath her hands wasn't a memory trying to trick her, that his heartbeat, though faint and uneven, still echoed beneath the fragile skin of his throat.
"You scared me," she whispered, the words catching on the sharp edge of the emotion still lodged in her throat. Her voice barely carried, as though speaking any louder might shatter the fragile thread holding them together. "I thought—I thought I lost you. I saw your body, and the rope, and your hands weren't moving, and I—" Her voice broke before she could finish, dissolving into breath and sound, nothing coherent, just truth left unfinished in the spaces between her words.
Theo let out a soft, broken chuckle, but the sound wasn't laughter so much as a reminder that he could still make sound at all. It was dry, cracked, and made him wince, but it was unmistakably him . "You'll never lose me, love," he rasped, the words shaped like something meant to soothe, though they landed with the weight of something sacred. His hand lifted again—slow, trembling, barely able to manage the movement—and curled weakly around her wrist, his fingers bruised, stiff, but unmistakably holding on. "You'd have to follow me to the afterlife to get rid of me." His mouth twitched into something close to a smile, though it trembled at the corners.
Luna made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob, the kind that split straight down the middle and bled out into both. Her arms tightened around him instinctively, as if drawing him closer could rewind time, could undo the horror that had almost taken him from her. "Don't joke," she said, trying to keep her voice light, but the shake in it betrayed her. "Not now. Not like this. Not when I can still see the bruises where the rope burned into your skin."
Theo's expression softened, the sarcasm retreating, the mask slipping. "Luna," he murmured, her name like a hymn from his lips, gentle and raw. "Look at me."
She pulled back slowly, just far enough to lift her gaze to his, her heart clenching the moment their eyes met. There was something there—something so unbearably open , so unguarded, that it nearly knocked the breath from her lungs. His brown eyes, dark and dulled by pain, still held a quiet, burning light. It was love. But not just love. It was devotion. Recognition. That haunted look of a man who had glimpsed the void and had chosen, against all odds, to come back for her .
"I love you," he said, and the words were not dramatic or embellished, but simple and clear, and spoken with a steadiness that carried the weight of an unbreakable vow. "I love you," he said again, as if once wasn't enough, as if saying it twice could etch it into the air between them so deeply that no magic could ever erase it.
Luna let out a soft, trembling laugh—less sound than breath—but there was something joyous buried deep in the sound, fragile and glimmering like light through fog. Her fingers slipped into his dark curls, tangling gently as her lips found his forehead, pressing a lingering kiss to the sweat-damp skin there. Then his nose. Then his bruised cheek. Each kiss was reverent, a blessing, a desperate thank-you to whatever forces had allowed her to hold him again. "You," she whispered thickly, her voice like honey spilt over broken glass, "are the most precious thing I have ever held in my life."
His thumb moved against her skin, the barest brush of motion, slow and shaky but real. "Then hold me a little longer," he whispered, barely louder than breath.
And so she did.
Without hesitation, she curled herself around him like a shield, like armor, her limbs folding around his trembling body with a tenderness that bordered on sacred. Her fingers slid beneath the blanket to rest over his heart, needing to feel its rhythm for herself, needing to memorize the way it beat beneath her palm—fragile, steady, alive . Her body trembled from exhaustion and relief, from adrenaline that had nowhere left to go, but she didn't move. She didn't loosen her grip. She would have laid there forever, if that's what it took to keep him safe. Her tears soaked into his shoulder as she whispered his name again and again, like a talisman, a grounding spell, a promise.
The world outside the walls of that healing room could wait. The grief, the rage, the vengeance still simmering in her bones could all wait.
Because she had him. Against all odds, she still had him.
And she would never let him go again.
~~~~~~
A hesitant knock echoed through the dimly lit bedroom, breaking the fragile silence. Luna sat curled at the edge of the bed, her fingers tangled in Theo's, unwilling to let go. The sheer terror of nearly losing him still clung to her, thick and suffocating, but he was here. He was alive. She could feel his pulse beneath her fingertips, steady and warm.
"Luna?" came Pansy's familiar voice from the other side of the door. "It's just me, love."
She exhaled shakily, wiping at the tears she hadn't realized were still falling. "Come in," she called softly.
Pansy stepped inside, her usual air of confidence slightly subdued. Her gaze flickered to Theo, who lay resting, his face bruised, the remnants of the past few days etched into every sharp line of his exhausted expression. He was healing, but the sight of him like this twisted something in Pansy's chest.
Luna broke before Pansy could even speak. Her body trembled as she sobbed, clutching Theo's hand as if he might vanish if she loosened her grip. "He's alive, Pansy… he's alive."
Pansy swallowed, her throat tightening. She had been there. She had seen what they had done to him, had fought like hell to bring them back, but she also understood what Luna truly meant. He wasn't just physically alive. He had survived.
She crossed the room in two strides and sank down onto the bed beside Luna, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. "Of course, he's alive," Pansy murmured, her voice softer than usual. "Because if he had the audacity to die, I would've personally resurrected him just to kill him again."
Luna let out a watery laugh, burying her face in her shoulder for a moment before pulling away, her breath still unsteady.
Pansy turned to Theo, her expression sharpening into something between exasperation and fierce affection. "You absolute fucking idiot," she hissed, glaring down at him like she was about to strangle him.
Theo, barely able to keep his eyes open, let out a low chuckle. "Don't get sentimental on me, Parkinson," he rasped, his voice raw from exhaustion. "I love you too, though."
Pansy scoffed, brushing her fingers under her eyes like she wasn't about to cry. "Ugh, disgusting."
"You're literally hugging Luna right now."
"She deserves it," Pansy sniffed. "You, however, deserve a swift kick in the ribs for nearly getting yourself killed."
Luna's grip on his hand tightened as she whispered, "Pansy… please bring my babies here."
Pansy's expression softened instantly. "Immediately, darling," she promised, standing gracefully and smoothing down her robes.
She turned to leave but hesitated at the door, looking back at Theo once more. "Don't you dare scare us like that again," she warned, her voice steady but thick with emotion.
He gave her a tired smirk. "No promises."
Pansy rolled her eyes and swept out of the room, leaving Luna to press her forehead against Theo's, her tears falling silently onto his skin.
She had him back.
And nothing in the world mattered more than that.
Notes:
I'm going to take a break fo a while after this, I hope you understand why. All my love xxx