War, Love, and Riddle //Mattheo Riddle x OC

Chapter Twenty Eight - Avada Kedavra

The moment Mattheo looked up and saw Hermione standing there, he knew something was wrong before she ever opened her mouth. It was written across her face in a way no battlefield could hide, in the tear tracks cutting through the soot on her cheeks, in the way Ron stood beside her with his shoulders hunched and his jaw clenched so tightly it looked painful. Around them, the Great Hall still breathed with grief. Survivors moved quietly between the dead, healers whispered over the wounded, candles flickered above bodies draped in house banners, but all of it seemed to fade behind the terrible emptiness of the space beside Hermione where Emma should have been. Emma should have been there. She should have been pushing through the crowd toward him, green eyes searching for his, hands reaching for him before anyone else. Instead, Hermione was walking toward him alone, holding a small glass vial in trembling fingers, and the longer Mattheo stared at it, the harder it became to breathe.

Pansy noticed the change in him almost instantly. Her hand pressed against his back as if she could physically keep him upright, but Mattheo barely felt it. His body had gone strangely cold, the kind of cold that didn't belong to skin or bone but to something much deeper, something buried in the hollow of his chest where Emma had made herself a home. Theo shifted beside him, Enzo's voice faded somewhere behind his shoulder, and Blaise went unnervingly still, but Mattheo couldn't look away from Hermione. He couldn't stop watching the vial catch the candlelight as she came closer, couldn't stop the sick, violent certainty building inside him with every step she took. Emma hadn't come herself. Emma had sent Hermione. And there was only one reason Emma Potter would ever send someone else to say goodbye.

Hermione stopped in front of him, and whatever careful control she had been clinging to cracked the second she looked into his face. She started speaking, but the words reached him as if they had to fight their way through water. Dumbledore's office. The Pensieve. Memories. Emma. Each word struck somewhere inside him without forming anything he could make sense of. His mind rejected them. His body refused to accept them. The girl he loved was not walking to her death while he stood in the Great Hall surrounded by corpses and candle smoke. She was not somewhere beyond his reach. She was not making the one choice he had begged her never to make.

"I need to go after her," he said, though his voice came out ruined, raw enough that Pansy's fingers curled into the back of his shirt.

Hermione shook her head with fresh tears spilling down her cheeks, and that single movement nearly destroyed him. "Mattheo, they have to do this. Harry and Emma have to go. It's the only way."

The words tore something open inside him. Magic surged before he could control it, violent and wild, snapping through the air as a nearby chair slammed into the wall hard enough to shatter. Several people screamed. Wood splintered across the stone floor. Pansy flinched but didn't let go of him, and Theo stepped closer like he thought he might have to hold Mattheo back from tearing the castle apart with his bare hands. Mattheo barely noticed any of it. All he could feel was the brutal pressure in his chest, the unbearable pain of a heart trying to keep beating after someone had ripped its reason away. "Then let it burn," he said, his voice shaking with something far darker than anger. "Then let it burn. Let every last piece of it turn to ash. I don't give a damn about prophecies or Dumbledore's grand plans. I don't care about saving a world that looked at a little girl and decided her life was worth less than everyone else's. They spent eighteen years turning her into a sacrifice and calling it destiny. They took the kindest person I've ever known and convinced her she was born to die. So don't stand there and tell me this is for the greater good. The greater good has been killing her one piece at a time since the day she was born." 

His breath broke, and when he looked at Hermione, there was nothing civilized left in his eyes. "You keep talking about saving the world as if it means something to me. Emma is my world. She's the reason I get out of bed in the morning. She's the reason I fight. The reason I breathe. If she's gone, then what exactly is it you're asking me to save?"