Fly Away

Fly Away

~*~

It makes sense that it should happen this way,
That the sky should break, and the earth should shake,
As if to say

Sure it all matters but in such an unimportant way.
As if to say

Fly away, sweet bird of prey,
Fly, fly away.
Nothing can stand in your way.
Sweet bird, if you knew the words
I know you'd say

Fly, fly away.

~*~

It was over. Through the cheers and celebration, she stared out at the battlefield before her. The ground was churned into mud, from a combination of rain, blood, bile and God-knew what else. From her vantage point, it was difficult to see which corpses had been enemies, and which had been allies.

But a corpse is a corpse (`of course, of course,´ she thought giddily), and there probably weren´t sides once you were dead. Just worms.

She collapsed heavily to the ground, and ran dirty fingers through even dirtier hair. It was hard to not start giggling. But at least if she did, everyone would just think it was because Good Had Triumphed! She wrapped her arms around herself and started rocking, back and forth, in the stinking mud.

Her grandfather had been in World War 2, she recalled. As a child, thirsty for knowledge, she had pestered him to tell her about it for a few weeks after her parents had made the mistake of buying her a book on 20^th century British history.

Finally, after he had had enough, Papa had retrieved an old snapshot album. He pulled out one photograph - a group of maybe two dozen young men, all in uniform, carrying rifles, and grinning broadly. He pointed himself out, and two others. Then he told her that they were the only ones, of the 20-odd boys in that picture, to survive the war.

She never asked him about WW2 again.

She had had an inkling of the horrors of war then, at that young age, but it was now, when it was spread out in front of her in all its sickening, Technicolor glory, that she knew why Papa hadn´t ever wanted to speak about it.

She realised that she was giggling and crying at the same time, then, and still rocking back and forth. She saw no reason to stop just yet, though.

How could they, how could Dumbledore, have let this happen? It was all so insane, and if the UN knew about the whole Army of Children thing, Hogwarts would be shut down within a week.

She laughed as sobs shook her body, and knew with quiet certainty that she was going mad.

Behind her, the victors, their own hysterical celebrations dying down, slowly began to make their way down to the main battlefield to collect the dead.

~*~

He stood alone as the fighters, many of them children, went to retrieve the bodies of the fallen.

It was madness, all of it. How could this have happened? When did they reach the point of desperation that the Order had seen fit to use children to fight their battles?

He already knew the answer to this, though, and it really wasn´t the old man´s fault. Voldemort had attacked Hogwarts, and though they had known the attack was coming, there was no real certainty - there had been enough time to contact about four dozen witches and wizards who were loyal to Dumbledore, briefly train the 6^th and 7^th years, and then...

Then Hell had erupted beside the Quidditch pitch.

He sighed, and started to walk down to help bring the dead into the castle, when he almost tripped over what appeared to be a very muddy, very hysterical Hermione Granger.

He quickly dropped to his knees in front of her and shook her gently. She was almost manic, and he feared that she had lost her mind completely.

"Miss Granger. Miss Granger. Miss Granger!" he repeated, till she finally hiccoughed and looked at him lucidly.

"Yes, Professor?"

"Are you injured?"
She shook her head vaguely, and looked around. "No, no. But, the others..."

Snape sighed, and grabbing a hold of her chin, directed her eyes back to his face. "Can you walk?"

"Of course," she said indignantly.

"Good."
He stood up, and pulled her with him. She teetered for a moment, but regained her balance. She turned away from the carnage, and started picking her way towards the castle. Snape followed close behind, somewhat surprised at her choice of direction - he had rather expected she would, in true Gryffindor fashion, brush herself off, smile grimly, and then march down to help the rest of the survivors begin the momentous task of cleaning up.

He forgot, sometimes, that she was only 18. She had often struck him as older.

She was moving faster now, dancing ahead of him over the grass, and the black, dramatically-roiling clouds, which Voldemort had summoned in an attempt to attain a suitably sinister atmosphere, had finally disappeared. Washed out sunlight managed to break through, and quickly spread across the castle.

It made everything, even the girl ahead of him, seem grey.

~*~

"I can´t stay here," she said quietly, staring out the window, some hours later.

He said nothing.

"Nothing makes sense now, and I need...I need to understand."

He could appreciate that - the need to make sense of something, and everything. What was that phrase Muggles used? Once Upon A Time.

Once upon a time he wanted to understand everything, wanted to take the world apart, take life apart, take feelings and agonies and ecstasies apart and find out what made them all work.

He had tried animals first - poisoning them painlessly, and then, the dissection. They had been, disappointingly, just as lacking in numbered pieces within as they were without. And of course there was no instruction manual.

After that, his undertaking had become somewhat trickier.

But that was all long since past - he had given up on trying to understand anything after his time as a Death Eater. Once one has seen a so-called friend decapitate the corpse of a child and find a wholly new and horrific use for itsoesophagus, one stops asking questions flat out.

"I´ll come back," she said, pulling him out of one nightmare and into another.

"Why?"

She blinked, and looked at him with the most clarity she had displayed since he first found her on the battlefield. "I just will. I´ll want to see the graves."

He nodded, and watched her carefully, trying to determine if she was still sane.

"Will you still be here?" Her voice startled him, and he couldn´t think of anything to say, except "Why?"

She looked at him. "Because I think I´d want to see you again."

And she kissed him, a faint brush of her lips against his. When he closed his eyes, her hair brushing against his face felt like feathers.

~*~*~*~