Would You Like A Hand?

3 | the shadows

She remembered fighting - throwing curses and jinxes, dodging and defending - but it was mostly a rushed memory, everything jumbling up in her head. One clear memory had been of Harry's pronounced death (but that didn't bother her now because it hadn't been true); she had felt her mind go numb as she screamed in denial. She thought her heart had broken then.

The next clear memory had been of the moment when Harry should have won the war. He had reappeared, alive, ready to take down Voldemort -

And all of a sudden, she found herself fighting the same faces over and over and over again -

Why wasn't anyone staying dead?

Hermione wasn't sure what had been scarier - the realization that the dead were fighting back, or the realization that the dead consisted of her enemies and her friends.

When she found herself attacking her dead friends, her mind shut down completely.

Somehow, someway, she remembered everyone locking themselves inside the school (what was the bloody place called again?).

A word had crossed her mind concerning the animated dead at one point (zombies), but she knew it was a Muggle concept. They were merely called undead by the other wizards and witches. And then she was reminded of another word: necromancy.

Voldemort was playing with the dead. Except maybe something had gone wrong because when Hermione thought of necromancy, she had thought the dead would retain their personalities (after all, the origin of these kinds of spells was merely for talking with the dead, right? She had read that somewhere before).

She remembered looking out a window, though, and taking a better look at the undead knocking at their door. They had been unthinking, only wanting to attack living things. They had been roaming the area for days after, even though some of them had fatal injuries.

Someone had said the killing curse didn't work on them. That makes sense, she had thought at the time, they're already dead. She figured the Imperious Curse didn't work on them either, since they were mindless.

Fortunately, not all spells were rendered useless. The undead were still able to be knocked back or tied up (although stunning curses weren't very effective; they walked around with fatal injuries - of course being stunned or stung or sliced up didn't stop them - it could only slow them).

It seemed the only way to stop them completely was to rip them apart thoroughly or burn them away.

Hermione remembered that a few days after that incident, most of the undead had finally been cleared away by the remaining adults around the school. Then a group of them had gone out to scout the area, and not all of them came back.

And they came back with bad news: the undead were slowly taking over the Muggle world as well as the wizarding world.

She wasn't surprised. Voldemort had hated Muggles, after all.

The next week had consisted of the adult wizards and witches trying to figure out what to do next while keeping some order in the students who had made it back to the school.

Hermione remembered wondering how many had been unable to find safety within the school. She was sure that not everyone had made it back. There had been a lot of grieving during that week as students and teachers realized they'd lost valuable friends and family. She couldn't remember the names that had been declared dead or missing, though.

The ones who went missing were probably all dead now, anyway.

And even though she had recognized some of those names at the time, Hermione knew that the people most important to her were still alive and fighting.

But it was during the three weeks that they had been confined in the school that Hermione's nightmares started.

Maybe living in the school had tricked her mind into thinking that all was peaceful again; she had thought that she didn't and wouldn't have time to dwell on the fact that she'd been tortured - or the fact that she'd seen horrendous battles being fought.

But she remembered seeing Harry's exhausted expression one morning and thinking that maybe he had had nightmares, too.

Hermione remembered that the students had been told to stay inside; only the adults got to leave the building, and each time they came back, they brought worsening news. Even though the war had been made up of fighting children, the older wizards and witches didn't want to let any of them outside.

The school had quite a lot of resources, so even though there were a large number of people staying there, no one would have to worry about food or water for a long while. But for Harry, being cooped up (even if it was his favourite place on earth) was maddening. He had taken to eavesdropping and gathering information from the older group (as usual).

This allowed the Golden Trio to learn of the undead - they were presumably blind (or close to it), but they could hear quite well, so silence was key when travelling. They were incapable of magic and didn't have any kind of will. It seemed they only wanted to kill - maybe because Voldemort had imparted some killing intent in them when they were summoned.

But the strangest thing was that there was a high chance that if someone was killed by the undead, they would resurrect and become one of them.

This was likely how the Muggle world had been taken over so fast - especially because they hadn't seen any of this coming.

Hermione remembered learning all this, and then she remembered Harry asking her and Ron -

"How about we leave and fix this?"