Run || Harry Potter FF

vi || thestrals

Now that I was closer to Harry, I could see that his dye job was badly done. There were patches of black scattered throughout the blonde. I tried to imagine Hagrid standing above him with a pungent smelling squirt bottle, kneading the dye through Harry's hair with his fingertips, but I couldn't. 

Harry's hands were balled up at the sides of his face and his eyes were squeezed shut. His breathing was ragged and he was slowly turning red. "Yeh havta understan', Harry. There's on'y so much one person can take. After yeh woke up and found out what happened, yeh'd gone mad. Yeh reached yer breaking point. Yeh were screamin' and sayin' it was all yer fault an' I knew that if I didn' do somethin', yeh would go back and get yerself killed again. So I begged McGonagall, oh I begged, and normally she might not o' done it, but we'd just lost so many that we loved an' we were all grievin'... Everyone around us had given up an' they were fleein' an' going into hidin'... An', an' we couldn't lose you too. So, she did it. And I brought yeh here... An' I hoped we could stay here forever--" 

"But you couldn't stay here forever, Hagrid. The Death Eaters are taking the muggles one by one. They're going to find you if you stay here," Neville explained. 

"Well, if I would've known what was going to happen...maybe I wouldn'--" 

"How could you not have known?" Neville yelled, standing up. 

Hagrid looked taken aback, and I'm sure the rest of us did too. "I'm sorry, Neville, but I didn'--" 

"No, you did. And you still did it. My gran--" 

"He didn't kill your gran, Neville," Draco interrupted, not looking up from his feet. 

Now both Hagrid and Neville looked taken aback. Apparently what he had said was completely out of character. I didn't know who Draco was before his parents died but it seemed as if the event altered him completely. 

Slowly, he noticed the lack of movement and conversation and looked up. "What?" After realizing that they were stunned by what he said, he spoke again. "We just need to remember who the enemy is, Neville. And it's not Hagrid." He turned his gaze back down, though they continued gaping at him. 

It was quiet still for a long while, but this time Harry broke the silence. "How could you have lied to me all this time? How could you take my memories?" he said through gritted teeth. He breathed as if he was trying to calm himself down, but he only got angrier. The skin over his knuckles turned white just as everything in the room started to shake. The two lightbulbs that lit the house exploded, glass scattering across the floor. 

I found myself becoming frightened. Magic was scary all by itself--the unknown was enough to make me uneasy--but this was different. This was the absence of control. He didn't even have a wand... And from the surprised look on his face, he didn't know he was even capable of doing that. 

"I'm sorry, Harry--" 

"Are you?" he breathed.  

"Harry--" Hagrid was cut off by the sound of the window breaking. I assumed it was just out of control magic again but no, the glass fracture was accompanied by another beam of light that hit Hagrid dead-on. "Blimey," he said, getting up and looking out the window. "Death Eaters." 

Neville and Draco armed themselves with wands while I pulled out my gun, which I had my hand on the entire visit. The door was blown open and three cloaked Death Eaters barged through the door. I immediately recognized one of them from my first encounter with magic. 

"You," he said, apparently recognizing me as well. I saw no visible signs of the gun shot wound that he surely had. Of course, he could have been healed by magic--if that was possible.