Extinguished 🩵 Harry Potter [2]

xiii ⟶ Our Woes

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xviii. Our Woes
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HER DESIRE TO join the fighting burns her whole body, and she is almost buzzing with electric and ready to run, when a familiar voice catches her ears and something horrible seizes her heart.

"You're joking, Perce! You actually are joking, Perce... I don't think I've heard you joke since you were –"

Thea's hand is blasted away from Harry's, as a deafening, skull-splitting explosion fills the air. A white noise takes over her entire body as she is enveloped in debris, gripping her wand more tightly than she ever has before. A scream rips from her throat as she's vomited from the air onto the hard, stone floor, and everything stops for a dazed and empty moment. She pushes off the huge slab of broken corridor crushing her stomach, and her muscles scream with effort, so much that she worries they might snap.

There's a great banging in her skull, and something wet, probably blood, is dripping from her mouth and down her chin. Every part of her body aches with bruises, but all she can focus on is that familiar head of red hair just a few feet away.

"Freddie?" she says quietly, as she sinks to her knees beside him.

She feels arms fall around her. Then drowned out sobs – Ron's sobs, she can make out now – fall onto her shoulder, as the horrid poison of a realisation she could've done without bleeds through her body. 

Fred can't hear her.

She knows that.

"No – no – no! No! Fred! No!"

Tendrils of numbness crawl through her body, starting as a coldness expanding outwards from her chest, until it eats into her lungs and her heart. She allows herself one glance at him, and the smile still curved on his face drags her back to the wedding, and back in his embrace.

Did Harry teach you to dance?

She can still hear him laughing every time she steps on his toes if she listens hard enough, if she goes back far enough to reach a place far, far away from here.

Except she can't go back to that place. She's not far away from here. She's right in the middle of it all, and there is nothing she can do but watch through the hourglass window, as she drowns in sand.

Untangling herself from Ron, who limply wails into his hands, she stands, flexing her fingers and wrists, cracking the joints and hearing the rage, the undiluted, fizzing bitterness sizzling in her veins.

She won't just sit and watch anymore. She's had enough of it.

"Thea? Where are you going? Thea, NO!"

Ignoring Harry's strained voice, Thea breaks into a sprint, her wand locked tightly in her hand, as she bursts into the fighting in the next corridor, dodging a Killing Curse and sending every hex and jinx that she can think of at any Death Eater she can see. 

A certain kind of ending follows her as she runs, one that has haunted her all year. Her face twists in an attempt to keep her grief and rage at bay, as she realises this perishing is not hot, like she'd always thought it would be. It's nothing to do with this fiery fury pulsing through her like it's a monster swimming in her veins, like she'd expected.

It's slow, hard and cold.

Her direction is driven still by the raging temper now spilling out of her. She hears random cries of her name from those she vaguely remembers from her classes, but all she can think about is Fred, lying there completely empty. Channelling the fury stops the tendrils of perishing cold coiling around her lungs, and rendering her a sobbing mess on the ground, utterly unhelpful, and letting them win.