Maybe she didn't return. She could meet up with the students who had been forced from the school before all of this began. Try to get as much information as possible, and if they were all that was left, she would have to organize them. And if, miraculously, some of her friends survived what was happening, they'd meet somewhere in the middle.

She stared down the hallway Draco Malfoy had disappeared, heading back toward the courtyard probably, looking for whoever had made him disobey not only his mother, but also his Dark Lord. She pressed her lips together.

He'd spared her at Malfoy Manor, spared all three of them. Of course he'd recognized them. Just as she could pick him out of a crowd of hundreds, she knew he could do the same. She had her hair and her "snotty" posture.

She knew the length of his strides. How stunned she'd been in fifth year when he had grown, almost as tall as Snape. It was like memorizing him again.

She knew the shade of his blond, of course. A beacon in darkness, but after seeing him with his parents, at the Quidditch World Cup and a handful of other times, she could choose his colors from between the three of them. He'd gotten the exact shade of blond from Narcissa, but the quality of Lucius's.

The quirk of his eyebrow, just before he delivered a fatal, witty blow was written across her veins. The slant of his lips before he smirked haunted a dark corner of her mind. The lifeless quality in his eyes, only recently developed, was sketched into her subconscious. Like he didn't have a soul. At least not one she was allowed to see.

And then only a handful of smiles. True smiles. Opening packages from his mother at the breakfast table. A truly divine Quidditch play. Something Blaise Zabini whispered into his ear during Potions class. She felt like it had been years since she'd seen one of those.

For her own sake, she hoped that he and his family would run to France. If she found his boxy shoulders beneath Death Eater robes, casting curses against her and her army, she wasn't sure if she would be able to—

"Stupefy!"

And her final thought, before crumpling to the familiar stones of her old school, was that she should have known caring for him would end here. Distracted, disarmed, and destroyed.

Chapter End Notes

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Chapter 2

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