snippet

[timepiececlock]

This business about always posting HP stuff is getting out of hand. I need to stop.

“I trust you,” Draco whispered, a pilgrim beholding a miracle in his own words. “I trust you.”

As the world titled, and the floor shook where they crouched, she answered the only way she could.

“Why?”

The footsteps of Dumbledore’s Army echoed outward from the metal stairwell. The cold hardened their breaths into steam, and Hermione looked at the manuscript resting on the floor between their forms. For the taking, if she dared, and she was always swift of hand.

Amplified from beneath them, a cacophony of pounding feet and screeching wyverns on chained leashes signaled the Army’s proximity. The sun was rising in the window across the room, a stripe of balefire caressing the crest of the hills. Their silver lining.

He pulled his hand away from where it hovered to grab the manuscript, keenly aware of what he was giving up to her. All that he was conceding into her keeping. “Because you’re better than me.”

Like a striking snake Hermione moved her body forward, hand flying up to his face. Her palm laid against his left temple as she physically tilted his face back, thumb on his forehead and fingers in his hair. His frame was immobilized by the intimacy of the contact, while his own fingers trembled at the significance. With Potter gone she led Voldemort's crumbling opposition, and her power as a wizard had been terrifying even before she assumed leadership and with it the Phoenix gem that increased one's magic tenfold. And now she was touching his face, her chilled fingers pressed into his own near-frozen skin. He’d never thought to be branded a second time in his life. It was without spell or ceremony, but in this moment, when death and hope rose with the same sun beyond the window, he found that he truly believed her voice alone was enough.

“However you have lived,” she whispered fiercely, awing him, “Whatever you have done, this day you are a General, and when I rebuild the Army—as it was meant to be—they will remember your name. I vow it to you.”

Her hand relaxed and slid from his face, eyes still caught in his. But his eyes hardened, and he threw his hair back as if to shake off her touch.

“Whatever,” he dismissed, refocusing his attention and his wand on the chamber’s double doors, where the Army, now damned and lost, would make its appearance. Hermione’s expression, however, did not change, even as she snatched up the manuscript and ran for the open ledge. When a blue goshawk pounded its wings toward the sky, a sheath crumpled yellow pages in its talons, the other didn’t watch it go. Draco Malfoy, 9th High General of Dumbledore’s Army, pointed his wand and greeted his former classmates, silhouette lit by the morning sun.

How time changes us all, he thought, before a barrage of Unforgivable curses shattered his final shield.

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:sigh: I want Buffy the Vampire Slayer to play on tv again. I want Farscape to play again. I want to have a new LotR movie every month, instead of every year. For the rest of my life.

How'd I do, wickedprincess3? Was my Draco *totally* OOC, or only just a little? Feel like cursing me to the fandom ghetto now as a dreaded fanon writer?

I was listening to the same Tori Amos song on repeat while writing this. No wonder it's all about death and war and good people turning evil and role reversals and stuff. Her music almost always makes me moody and slightly depressed.

Comments

[leather-wings.livejournal.com]

Aww, cute. Sad but cute. Especially the fluffy dialogue and gesture at the beginning.
Aster