From the moment Lavinia fired the first spell, time lost all meaning. Her world became a blur of friends and foes, her wand as whip-quick as it had ever been, her heart forgotten somewhere between her chest and her throat. All she could think was that she would not go down without a fight. She would not be able to stand before her beloved dead, before James and Lily and Sirius, unless she fought for every last breath she could take. She would not give up because if she did... if she did then live or die, there would be nothing but an eternity of shame waiting for her on the other side.
So she fought. She fought with a ferocity that surprised her. A ferocity she had never had before. A ferocity she had not always understood when she'd seen it in her friends. For the first time in her life, she fought with a lion's heart and not that cautious, hesitant thing that truly belonged in her chest. For the first time, she felt brave.
And she hated it.
It was like being someone else. Someone who didn't linger on the faces of the people she shot at, didn't think about the names she knew belonged to them or the families that would be left behind. She just... fought. Because her life and her poor little heart that she knew would bring those faces to bear in her dreams, didn't matter. The wounded in the ward behind her mattered. The children fighting at her side mattered.
And if she risked some immortal soul, or perhaps just her fragile mortal heart, she would care later. Because she couldn't right now.
The worst part, really, was that it worked. It made a difference. Under the rain of spells from the wands of every able body in the hall, the acromantulas retreated and though Lavinia heard shouts and names called and thought someone must have gotten caught in the receding tide, it was, she told herself, better than if the spiders had swarmed in instead of out. Because though she hated herself for even thinking it, it was better one life than many.
Of course, then a giant's foot landed not ten feet from the steps up to the castle and all thoughts of spiders or moral dilemmas vanished from Lavinia's head. She had seen people fight giants before and it hadn't gone well. Those had been fully trained wizards already familiar with battlegrounds too. With this army... Better to stay away, she thought, sending a locomotor spell that jerked a student out of the way of the giant's wandering feet. The child looked around, as though searching for who to thank, wasting precious moments he should have used to protect himself.
But Lavinia paid him no heed, wand already turned elsewhere, to the steps of the Grand Staircase, the halls off the sides of the Great Hall, the balconies and staircases above, anywhere at all where she saw faces that belong to Death Eaters. Anywhere she saw unfriendly spells fired from. And she did not give herself room to think. Room to feel. She just moved.
And when there was the occasional brief lull in the fighting, she ran for the bodies she could see scattered on the floor and pulled them back towards the ward, leaving them at the entrance where Heather and Madam Pomfrey could help them. Or rather, some of them. Because some of the faces were staring and blank. Some of the eyes were glassy and open when they should not have been. Some of those hearts had simply... stopped beating.
And still, Lavinia did not let herself pause because somehow there was always another Death Eater. Always another monster. Always something else to fight. So however much the safety of the hall behind her beckoned, Lavinia did not retreat. Even as those moments of pause she'd used to collect bodies dwindled and disappeared. Even as she and the other defenders were pushed back and the front doors became a line they could not hold. Even as she realized nearly every spell she was casting was defensive, a desperate shield against the seemingly endless onslaught. And with every spell she fired, her wand seemed to get a little heavier, like a weight was pressing down on her, a darkness that was a physical thing. It became harder, it seemed, to separate herself from the faces on the other side. Harder to force their names out of her head. Harder to ignore the families she knew waited for them at home, praying for their safe return.
It wasn't until Lavinia saw them that she understood why. Through the doors now hanging off their hinges, she could see dementors, floating in the distance. They weren't close enough yet to do much, but then, it didn't take much. And, Lavinia realized with a hopeless little twinge in her stomach, they were getting closer.
It was, Lavinia thought, as though the sight of them made their powers all the stronger. Because seeing them there, en masse, knowing somewhere deep in her soul that no patronus would come to her now, it truly seemed hopeless. And what a way to go, she found herself thinking. Not to die, but to live soulless, left baren by the kiss of those horrid creatures.
She could feel her wand lowering. Could feel the strength leaving her and knew she needed to fight it, needed to pull herself together and fight to the last breath. But what was the point? They were losing. She knew that. Looking around the hall, it was all too clear. There were the bodies of children on the floor. There were spells flyings left, right, center and above. There was no way out. Nowhere to go. Just that advancing wall of dementors, waiting for them, moving slowly, oh so slowly. Like they were cherishing this. Like they knew there was no rush because their victory was all but ensured.
Lavinia's wand had well and truly fallen when suddenly, the noises ceased, the Death Eaters halted, standing at attention. The students and Order members froze, staring around in fear and apprehension. And for the second time that night, the Dark Lord's voice echoed across the Hogwarts grounds.
"You have fought valiantly," the voice said slowly, almost, Lavinia thought, mockingly. "Lord Voldemort knows how to value bravery." Bravery. The word echoed hollowly in Lavinia's head. Bravery. She looked around. There were bodies on the floor felled by her wand. Bodies whose faces she knew. What a price to pay for bravery.
"Yet you have sustained heavy losses," the voice continued, pulling Lavinia's eyes away from those enemy casualties she should not have cared so much about to the bodies of her fellow fighters, some breathing, some unconscious, some undoubtedly dead.
"If you continue to resist me, you will all die, one by one." It might have seemed a rather grandiose threat, Lavinia thought distractedly. Only standing here, it seemed so very plausible.
"I do not wish this to happen. Every drop of magical blood spilled is a waste." A lie, she knew, but at this point, it didn't much matter. Everyone already knew there was no going back from this, no matter how pure their blood might be.
"Lord Voldemort is merciful," the Dark Lord continued. "I command my forces to retreat immediately." And now the fearful expressions of Lavinia's fellows altered. They were suddenly suspicious, confused, and a few, almost hopeful. Fools, Lavinia thought, to have hope in a moment like this. Wonderful, lovely, essential fools who might just manage to keep the rest of them from giving up.
"You have one hour," the Dark Lord pronounced. "Dispose of your dead with dignity. Treat your injured."
And still, no one moved. No one dared. And then, as though realizing that this was some hidden queue, the Death Eaters backed up. They retreated. They didn't grab their dead. Only a few even bothered to lend a hand to the wounded. And they left the castle, presumably to go wherever their Master awaited them.
Lavinia watched them go, still feeling rather frozen, even as the heavy, dementor induced darkness left her. She just... stood there, trying to pretend she didn't recognize the short brown hair at the back of the retreating line. Trying to pretend she wasn't waiting for him to look back.
He didn't. Of course he didn't. And she'd known he wouldn't. But...
"I speak now, Harry Potter, directly to you." The Dark Lord's voice echoed again and several people jumped, presumably having thought, like Lavinia, that this littler pronouncement, whatever its purpose had been, was finished. But it wasn't, and in an awful, selfish part of her, Lavinia was glad. Glad for the distraction. Glad for a reason to look away from those retreating figures and the redemption she was never going to be able to offer any of them.
"You have permitted your friends to die for you rather than face me yourself," the Dark Lord continued, the words now not merely a pronouncement, but an accusation. "I shall wait for one hour in the Forbidden Forest. If, at the end of that hour, you have not come to me, have not given yourself up, then battle recommences. This time," the Dark Lord added, something like a smile audible in the words, "I shall enter the fray myself, Harry Potter, and I shall find you, and I shall punish every last man, woman and child who has tried to conceal you from me." There was pause. A heavy one. It was as though the Dark Lord was savoring it, utterly pleased with himself before he added in a voice that still held that awful smile, "One hour."
Lavinia stood still, waiting for the echo of the Dark Lord's presence to vanish, her head stuck wondering what Harry would do because he couldn't give in. He simply couldn't. And yet... well. Those words were intended for a very specific purpose. Lavinia could only pray they did not achieve it.
It took Lavinia a long time to pull herself back to the moment and when she did, she found that people were chattering now, tiredly, quietly, concernedly. Lavinia did not join in. She didn't add to their speculations of how this hour could be used or wonder what had sparked the Dark Lord to their mercy.
Because this wasn't a mercy. This was a cruelty masquerading as kindness. A calculated risk. A gamble. And a good one. Because yes, they would have enough time to gather their dead and tend to the wounded as much as they could. They would regroup. They would heal. And some fighters who might otherwise have been out of commission would come back stronger.
But they would also be forced to reckon with the cost. With the bodies. With the grief.
And as many fighters as they might regain from the healer's ministrations, they were likely to lose just as many to that foul beast of hopelessness. The thought made Lavinia glance to the side, towards those few faces she'd seen spark with something like hope earlier. It wouldn't be enough, she knew that. No amount of hesitant smiles or false optimism could keep people going when they saw the bodies of their loved ones lying on the floor.
And there were bodies indeed. Plenty of them.
The small line they had assembled to the side of the hall started growing almost as soon as the Dark Lord stopped speaking. It stretched the length of one wall and then began another row as friends and family and strangers brought in corpses from the side halls, the grounds, the upper levels.
Lavinia ignored their accumulation. Ignored the people bringing them in. Ignored the screams and sobs of loved ones as they spotted familiar faces in the line. She ignored all of it. She didn't want to see. Didn't want to know. Didn't want to think. So she merely busied her hands over the wounded, over the people they still had a chance to save and tried not to worry about the faces she might find among the still growing lines of bodies if she dared to look.
It was a quiet way of running. A familiar way. And Lavinia leapt into it without second thought because a part of her knew that if she looked at that line, if there was even one of those dreaded faces among them, she would collapse. And she could not afford to.
So she moved from bed to bed, leaving the minor, easy injuries to Madam Pomfrey and Heather because they would not keep her distracted enough. She needed puzzles, she needed challenges, she needed something that would occupy her whole damn head because she couldn't let those thoughts in, couldn't wonder what their faces might look like in death. She simply couldn't.
She managed it for a while, riddling out what curses had been used and remembering the strange combinations of spells and potions they'd used to heal such things in the ward. She kept notes, like she could have at work. She conjured bits of parchment and a quill and catalogued the conditions. She was precise, thorough. Robotic. She dropped as deep into that unfeeling pit as she had ever dared go, necessity driving her down, terror keeping her there.
She hardly even felt like she was in that room. It could have been anywhere. Every bit of her focus was trained on the task at hand, on the next spell, the next potion to fetch, the next puzzle to solve.
She nearly knocked over the potions cart beside her when a touch came on her elbow and she whirled, shocked to find herself in this hall, in this body, in this reality as she was jolted from that comfortable world of unfeeling focus to find Heather standing there, a sadness in her face the likes of which Lavinia had never seen on her friend's features.
Something went still in her core.
Not Jasmine. It couldn't be Jasmine.
"Vin..." Heather began, the words gentle, the tone one might use when approaching a skittish animal. It made the hair on Lavinia's arms raise, made something from her chest lodge itself firmly in her throat so she couldn't speak, couldn't even ask the question that pushed against her silent tongue as her daughter's face burned in her mind's eye, attached to an unmoving body. Just as it had been in her nightmares.
Please not Jasmine.
But Heather, whether she saw the fear in Lavinia's features or not, was apparently lost for words. She simply pointed, the single finger extended towards the row of bodies sending Lavinia tumbling towards something like panic.
Not Jasmine.
But when Lavinia stumbled around the cots and came to a stop at the feet of one of the too many bodies in the row, she found that it was not Jasmine.
It was perhaps the only thing in the world that was worse.
A/N: Okay I know it's a cliff hanger and it's awful and I'm sorry!! The good news is that because this week was such a shit show, I decided to ignore all the rest of my responsibilities and put them off to the weekend which means I did a solid amount of writing in the last few days and I have 2.5 chapters in the backlog. So. Because I'm nice and because I know this cliff hanger sucks, the next update will be Sunday night.
In other news, to the shock of literally no one but me, sleep really does make a difference in mental health. My roommate, who I currently might possibly slightly hate a little bit, kept me up until 3:30 am the night before the P Chem exam. She made dinner at 1:30, no joke. I wanted to cry but also, I was tired as fuck and didn't trust myself not to scream, so I didn't end up saying anything. And then the next night, I was done with P Chem so I was like... fuck it, I'm gonna finish my book. And then it was 2am. And then the next day I was... not vibing. Like wow it was shocking how quickly I went into Bad Thoughts mode. Basically, this is a PSA: don't make dinner at 1:30 am if you live in a studio apartment with someone who is clearly trying to sleep and also, do try to get sleep bc wow it makes a difference.
Anyway, as usual, I hope y'all enjoyed and I'll be back again soon!